Bounds on the mass of doubly-charged Higgs bosons in the same-sign diboson decay scenario

TL;DR

This paper investigates the mass bounds of doubly-charged Higgs bosons decaying into same-sign dibosons, providing new lower mass limits based on existing collider data and exploring potential future constraints.

Contribution

It offers the first dedicated analysis of the diboson decay scenario for doubly-charged Higgs bosons, extending mass bounds using LHC and LEP data.

Findings

Lower mass bounds of 60-68 GeV from current data

Potential to extend bounds up to 85-90 GeV with more data

Detailed decay and production cross section analysis

Abstract

A direct search for doubly-charged Higgs bosons $H^{\pm\pm}$ is one of the most important probe in the Higgs Triplet Model, which is motivated by generation mechanisms of tiny neutrino masses. There are two major decay modes of $H^{\pm\pm}$; i.e., the same-sign dilepton decay $H^{\pm\pm}\to\ell^\pm\ell^\pm$ and the same-sign diboson decay $H^{\pm\pm}\to W^{\pm(*)}W^{\pm(*)}$. For the case where the former decay mode is dominant, the lower limit on the mass of $H^{\pm\pm}$ has been set at about 400 GeV by ATLAS and CMS Collaborations. On the other hand, for the case where the latter decay mode is dominant, no dedicated search has been performed in the past. By taking into account characteristic signals of $H^{\pm\pm}$ in the diboson decay scenario at LEP and the LHC experiments, we find that the lower mass bound of 60-68 GeV can be obtained using the same-sign dilepton search performed by ATLAS Collaboration with 4.7 fb$^{-1}$ data at the collision energy of 7 TeV. We also show that the limit can be extended up to about 85-90 GeV, assuming the integrated luminosity of 20 fb$^{-1}$ and 7 TeV for the collision energy. We give detailed explanations on the decay properties of $H^{\pm\pm}$ for relatively small mass cases and also on production cross sections of $H^{\pm\pm}$ at the next-to-leading order of QCD at the LHC.