Detecting heavy charged Higgs bosons at the CERN LHC with four<i>b</i>-quark tags

Abstract

We investigate the signature of a heavy charged Higgs boson of the minimal super-symmetric standard model in the lepton plus multijet channel at the CERN Large Hadron Collider with four b tags. The signal is the gluon-gluon fusion process $g\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{g}t\overline{b}{H}^{\ensuremath{-}},$ followed by the ${H}^{\ensuremath{-}}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\overline{t}b$ decay, while the main background is from $g\stackrel{\ensuremath{\rightarrow}}{g}t\overline{t}b\overline{b}.$ We find that the two can be separated effectively by kinematic cuts and mass reconstruction, but the signal size is not very large in the end. Nonetheless, with a good b-tagging efficiency ${\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{b}\ensuremath{\sim}50%,$ this channel can provide a viable signature over a limited but interesting range of the parameter space.