Charged-Higgs-boson production at the LHC: NLO supersymmetric QCD corrections

Abstract

The dominant production process for heavy charged Higgs bosons at the LHC is the associated production with heavy quarks. We have calculated the next-to-leading-order supersymmetric QCD corrections to charged-Higgs production through the parton processes $q\bar{q},gg \to tbH^{\pm}$ and present results for total cross sections and differential distributions. The QCD corrections reduce the renormalization and factorization scale dependence and thus stabilize the theoretical predictions. We present a comparison of the next-to-leading-order results for the inclusive cross section with a calculation based on bottom--gluon fusion $gb \to tH^{\pm}$ and discuss the impact of the next-to-leading-order corrections on charged-Higgs searches at the LHC.