Production of doubly charged scalars from the decay of a heavy SM-like Higgs boson in the Higgs Triplet Model

Abstract

The Higgs Triplet Model (HTM) of neutrino mass generation predicts the existence of doubly charged Higgs bosons (H^{\pm\pm}). In the HTM a scalar eigenstate (H_2) is dominantly composed of the scalar field from the isospin doublet, and could be significantly heavier than H^{\pm\pm}. Such a scenario would allow the possibility of a large branching ratio for the decay H_2-> H^{++}H^{--}. From the production mechanism of gluon-gluon fusion, gg-> H_2, the above decay mode would give rise to pair production of doubly charged Higgs bosons (H^{++}H^{--}) with a cross section which could be significantly larger than the cross sections for the standard production mechanisms qqbar -> \gamma,Z-> H^{++}H^{--} and q'qbar -> W -> H^{\pm\pm}H^{\mp}. We discuss the phenomenological consequences for the ongoing searches for H^{\pm\pm} at the Tevatron and at the LHC.