Searching for resonant flavor-changing charged Higgs production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a search strategy for resonant charged Higgs production at the LHC within a two-Higgs-doublet model, highlighting potential for discovery with current data through specific decay channels and flavor-changing couplings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resonant production and decay channel for charged Higgs in the G2HDM, with a detailed analysis of its detectability at the LHC.

Findings

Potential for discovery with existing LHC Run 2 data.

Resonant production via top-charm coupling enhances signal.

Same-sign dilepton signals provide a clear experimental signature.

Abstract

We suggest a resonant $c \bar b \to H^+$ production search, followed by bosonic $H^+ \to W^+ H$ weak decay at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the general two-Higgs-doublet model (G2HDM) that has flavor-changing neutral Higgs couplings, $H^+$ is resonantly produced via the top-charm $\rho_{tc} V_{tb}$ coupling at tree level, while $H^+ \to W^+ H$ weak decay occurs within the exotic second doublet, leading eventually to same-sign dilepton signals. We perform a signal-to-background analysis at the 14 TeV LHC and show that discovery seems possible with LHC Run 2 data already at hand.