Observability of Light Charged Higgs Decay to Muon in Top Quark Pair Events at LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to observe a light charged Higgs decaying to a muon and neutrino in top quark pair events at the LHC, estimating signal significance at high luminosity.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the observability of H -> mu nu decay mode at the LHC, including signal estimation and significance for various charged Higgs masses.

Findings

Signal significance can reach close to 5 for certain Higgs masses.

Detection is challenging due to small branching ratio of H -> mu nu.

Analysis suggests feasible observation at high luminosity with specific mass range.

Abstract

In this paper the charged Higgs signal through the decay to a pair of muon and neutrino (H -> mu nu) is analyzed. The analysis attempts to estimate the amount of muonic signal of the charged Higgs at LHC at a center of mass energy of 14 TeV. The signal process is the top quark pair production with one of the top quarks decaying to a charged Higgs (non SM anomalous top quark decay) and the other decaying to a W boson which is assumed to decay hadronically to two light jets. Due to the small branching ratio of charged Higgs decay to muon, results are quoted for data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 300 fb^-1 which is expected to be collected at the LHC high luminosity regime. It is shown that a signal significance close to 5 down to below 1 is achievable for a charged Higgs mass in the range 80 GeV < m(H \pm) < 150 GeV taking the top quark pair production with both top quarks decaying to W bosons as the main irreducible background.