Low-mass doubly charged Higgs bosons at the LHC

Search for light (within the mass range 84-200 GeV) doubly charged Higgs bosons decaying into a pair of W bosons has been deemed challenging using the conventional LHC searches with leptons, jets, and missing transverse momentum in the final state. Such Higgses, together with slightly heavier singly -charged and neutral Higgses, when arranged in an SU(2)L triplet as in the type-II seesaw model, have been recently shown to accommodate the recent measurement of the W-boson mass by the CDF Collaboration. When produced in a highly Lorentz-boosted regime, these tend to manifest as a single fat jet or a pair of adjacent same-sign leptons plus missing transverse momentum. First, we perform a multivariate analysis to discern such exotic jets from the standard model jets. Then, we present a novel search in the final state with an exotic jet and two same-sign leptons plus missing transverse momentum. We find that such low-mass doubly charged Higgses could be directly probed with the already collected Run 2 LHC data.

Automated summary

The search for light doubly charged Higgs bosons, decaying into a pair of W bosons within the mass range of 84-200 GeV, has been challenging using conventional LHC searches. Recent research has shown that when these Higgs bosons are arranged in an SU(2)L triplet with slightly heavier singly-charged and neutral Higgs bosons, they can accommodate the recent measurement of the W boson mass by the CDF Collaboration. In a highly Lorentz-boosted regime, they tend to manifest as a single fat jet or a pair of adjacent same-sign leptons plus missing transverse momentum. A multivariate analysis is performed to distinguish these exotic jets from standard model jets, followed by a novel search in the final state with an exotic jet and two same-sign leptons plus missing transverse momentum using the already collected Run 2 LHC data.