Prospects for charged Higgs searches at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current status and strategies for searching for charged Higgs bosons in non-supersymmetric models at the LHC, emphasizing the challenges and importance of such discoveries.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of search strategies for charged scalars in multi-Higgs-doublet models, highlighting the experimental challenges and theoretical implications.

Findings

Charged Higgs discovery is challenging due to constrained parameter space.

QCD background significantly complicates charged Higgs searches.

Future colliders could improve detection prospects.

Abstract

The goal of this report is to summarize the current situation and discuss possible search strategies for charged scalars, in non-supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model at the LHC. Such scalars appear in Multi-Higgs-Doublet models (MHDM), in particular in the popular Two-Higgs-Doublet model (2HDM), allowing for charged and additional neutral Higgs bosons. These models have the attractive property that electroweak precision observables are automatically in agreement with the Standard Model at the tree level. For the most popular version of this framework, Model~II, a discovery of a charged Higgs boson remains challenging, since the parameter space is becoming very constrained, and the QCD background is very high. We also briefly comment on models with dark matter which constrain the corresponding charged scalars that occur in these models. The stakes of a possible discovery of an extended scalar sector are very high, and these searches should be pursued in all conceivable channels, at the LHC and at future colliders.