Discovery potential of charged Higgs at LHC in H+- -tau nu decays.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 0 1 0 5 1 9 9 v 1 1 9 M a y 2 0 0 1 DISCOVERY POTENTIAL FOR H± AT LHC IN H± → τ±ν DECAYS A. TRICOMI Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia and INFN Catania Catania, Italy The discovery potential of charged Higgs from pp → tH± in the H± → τν decay channel is investigated in CMS and ATLAS. For mH± mt, the most relevant channels are H ± → tb and H± → τν. Whereas the former has the largest branching ratio it suffers of large irreducible backgrounds, while the latter offers a very clean enviroment when appropriate cuts are used. Making use of the τ polarization effects, in the purely hadronic final states an almost background-free signal is selected. The expected discovery range is evaluated for CMS and ATLAS with 30 fb?1 each in the low luminosity running conditions and the combined results are presented. 1 Introduction In the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), the Higgs sector consists of five physical states, two of which are charged (H±), while the other are neutral (h0, H0 and A0). At tree level all Higgs masses and couplings are expressed in terms of two parameters, generally taken as mA, the mass of the CP-odd neutral Higgs A 0, and tanβ, the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the Higgs doublets 1. While any of the neutral Higgs bosons may be difficult to distinguish from the Standard Model one, the H± carries a distinctive signature of the SUSY Higgs sector. Moreover the coupling of H± are uniquely related to tan β, therefore the detection of H± and the measurement of its mass and couplings should play a very important role in probing the MSSM Higgs sector. In a model independent way, LEP experiments have set lower limits on the mass of the charged Higgs boson, mH± 78.5 GeV/c 2 for any tanβ 2. CDF and D? have performed several searches for H± 3,4: a direct search through the decay H± → τν was performed at high tan β ( 10), while at low tanβ ( 1) an indirect search for the decay channel H± → cs? was carried out. D? p