Uncovering the Charming Higgs at the LHC

Abstract

We study the observability of the Higgs boson in the "charming Higgs" model. In this model the Higgs boson primarily undergoes a cascade decay to four charm quarks via light intermediate pseudoscalars. Such a decay allows the Higgs boson to escape the most stringent LEP bounds on the Standard Model Higgs boson mass. If the light pseudoscalars are sufficiently light they become highly boosted and their decay products collimated into jets. We show that by using jet substructure techniques, this model is potentially observable at the LHC. For a Higgs boson mass of 100 GeV and light pseudoscalar mass of 12 GeV, we find a signal significance of 3.8 sigma with a luminosity of 30 fb^-1 and that a 5 sigma significance can be obtained with 50 fb^-1 of luminosity at the 14 TeV LHC.