Low-mass doubly-charged Higgs bosons at LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel search strategy for light doubly-charged Higgs bosons at the LHC, focusing on highly Lorentz-boosted regimes where they produce distinctive signatures like exotic jets and same-sign leptons, potentially detectable with existing data.

Contribution

It introduces a new search method for low-mass doubly-charged Higgs bosons using boosted decay signatures and multivariate analysis, expanding the experimental reach beyond conventional approaches.

Findings

Potential to directly probe low-mass doubly-charged Higgses with current LHC data

Development of a multivariate analysis to distinguish exotic jets from SM jets

Identification of a novel final state with an exotic jet and same-sign leptons

Abstract

Search for light (within the mass range 84-200 GeV) doubly-charged Higgs bosons decaying into a pair of W-bosons has been deemed challenging using the conventional LHC searches with leptons, jets and missing transverse momentum in the final state. Such Higgses together with slightly heavier singly-charged and neutral Higgses, when arranged in an $SU(2)_L$ triplet as in the type-II see-saw model, are lately shown to accommodate the recent measurement of the $W$-boson mass by the CDF collaboration. These, when produced in a highly Lorentz-boosted regime, tend to manifest themselves as a single fat-jet or a pair of adjacent same-sign leptons plus missing transverse momentum. First, we perform a multivariate analysis to discern such exotic jets from the SM jets. Then, we present a novel search in the final state with an exotic jet and two same-sign leptons plus missing transverse momentum. We find that such low-mass doubly-charged Higgsses could be directly probed with the already collected Run 2 LHC data.