Probing Doubly Charged Higgs Bosons at the LHC through Photon Initiated Processes

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that photon-photon fusion significantly enhances the production of doubly charged Higgs bosons at the LHC, leading to revised mass limits and discovery prospects compared to previous Drell-Yan based estimates.

Contribution

It introduces the importance of photon initiated processes in doubly charged Higgs boson production and updates mass bounds and discovery reach accordingly.

Findings

Photon-photon fusion contributes significantly to Higgs pair production.

New mass lower limits are set at 748 GeV and 570 GeV for different models.

Discovery reach extends to 846 GeV and 783 GeV with 100 fb$^{-1}$ at 13 TeV.

Abstract

We show that the photon-photon fusion process contributes significantly to the pair production of doubly charged Higgs bosons at the LHC at a level comparable to the Drell-Yan production. We reinterpret the ATLAS lower limit of 570 GeV (420 GeV) on the mass of $\Delta_{L}^{\pm\pm}$ ($\Delta_{R}^{\pm\pm}$) arising from $SU(2)_L$ triplet (singlet) scalar by including the photon initiated process and derive a new lower limit of 748 GeV (570 GeV), assuming that $\Delta^{\pm \pm}$ decays into $e^\pm e^\pm$ 100% of the time. We have also shown that the 5$\sigma$ discovery reach for ${\Delta_{L}^{\pm\pm}}$ (${\Delta_{R}^{\pm\pm}}$) is 846 GeV (783 GeV) with 100 fb$^{-1}$ luminosity at 13 TeV LHC. We derive a somewhat more stringent limit on the mass when the doubly charged scalar arises from higher dimensional representations of $SU(2)_L$.