Discriminating between lepton number violating scalars using events with four and three charged leptons at the LHC

Many Standard Model extensions predict doubly-charged scalars; in particular, all models with resonances in charged lepton-pair channels with non-vanishing lepton number; if these are pair produced at the LHC, the observation of their decay into l(-/+)l(-/+)W(-/+)W(-/+) will be necessary in order to establish their lepton-number violating character, which is generally not straightforward. Nonetheless, the analysis of events containing four charged leptons (including scalar decays into one or two taus as well as into W bosons) makes it possible to determine whether the doubly-charged excitation belongs to a multiplet with weak isospin T = 0,1/2,1,3/2 or 2 (assuming there are no excitations with charge > 2); though discriminating between the isosinglet and isodoublet cases is possible only if charged-current events cannot produce the doubly-charged isosinglet (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.