Trilepton + top signal from chargino-neutralino decays of MSSM charged Higgs bosons at the LHC

Abstract

We perform for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) a detailed study of charged Higgs boson production via the top-bottom quark associated mode followed by decays into a chargino and a neutralino, with masses and couplings as given by the general Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). We focus our attention on the region of parameter space where the charged Higgs is heavier than the top quark, with intermediate values of tan beta. In this region, the identification of charged Higgs bosons via decays into Standard Model (SM) particles has proven to be ineffective. Modelling the CMS detector, we find that a signature consisting of three hard leptons accompanied by a hadronically reconstructed top quark plus substantial missing transverse energy, which may result from charged Higgs decays into neutralinos and charginos, can be made viable over a large variety of initially overwhelming SM and MSSM backgrounds, provided MSSM input parameters are favourable: notably, a small mu parameter and light sleptons are important prerequisites. We quantify these statements by performing a fairly extensive scan of the parameter space, including realistic hadron-level simulations, and delineate some potential discovery regions.