Top decays with flavor changing neutral Higgs interactions at the LHC

We investigate the prospects for discovering a top quark decaying into one light Higgs boson along with a charm quark in top quark pair production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A general two Higgs doublet model is adopted to study the signature of flavor changing neutral Higgs decay t -> c phi(0), where phi(0) could be CP-even (H-0) or CP-odd (A(0)). The dominant physics background is evaluated with realistic acceptance cuts as well as tagging and mistagging efficiencies. For a reasonably large top-charm-Higgs coupling (lambda(tc)/lambda(t) greater than or similar to 0.09), the abundance of signal events and the reduction in physics background allow us to establish a 5 sigma signal for M-phi similar to 125 GeV at the LHC with a center of mass energy (root s) of 8 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 20 fb(-1). The discovery potential will be greatly enhanced with the full energy of root s = 14 TeV. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.