Search for Doubly Charged Higgs Bosons at LEP2

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for doubly charged Higgs bosons at LEP2 energies, finding no evidence and setting a lower mass limit of 97.3 GeV/c^2, thus constraining certain theoretical models.

Contribution

The study provides the first direct experimental lower mass limit for doubly charged Higgs bosons at LEP2 energies in left-right symmetric models.

Findings

No excess events observed over Standard Model background.

Lower mass limit of 97.3 GeV/c^2 set at 95% confidence level.

Constraints placed on doubly charged Higgs bosons in specific models.

Abstract

A search for pair-produced doubly charged Higgs bosons has been performed using the data collected by the DELPHI detector at LEP at centre-of-mass energies between 189 and 209 GeV. No excess is observed in the data with respect to the Standard Model background. A lower limit for the mass of 97.3 GeV/c^2 at the 95% confidence level has been set for doubly charged Higgs bosons in left-right symmetric models for any value of the Yukawa coupling between the Higgs bosons and the tau leptons.