Abstract :
We analyse the chances of detecting charged Higgs bosons of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the W±h mode, followed by the dominant decay of the lightest Higgs scalar, h→bb̄. If the actual value of Mh is already known, this channel offers possibly the optimal final state kinematics for charged Higgs discovery, thanks to the narrow resonances appearing around the W± and h masses. Besides, within the MSSM, the H±→W±h decay rate is significant for not too large tanβ values, thus offering the possibility of accessing a region of MSSM parameter space left uncovered by other search channels. We consider both strong (QCD) and electroweak (EW) `irreducibleʹ backgrounds in the 3b-tagged channel to the gg→tb̄H− production process that had not been taken into account in previous analyses. After a series of kinematic cuts, the largest of these processes is tb̄W±h production in the continuum. However, for optimum tanβ, i.e., between 2 and 3, the charged Higgs boson signal overcomes this background and a narrow discovery region survives around MH±≈200 GeV.
