Searching for resonant flavor-changing charged Higgs production at the LHC

Abstract

We suggest a resonant $c \bar b \to H^+$ production search, followed by bosonic $H^+ \to W^+ H$ weak decay at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the general two-Higgs-doublet model (G2HDM) that has flavor-changing neutral Higgs couplings, $H^+$ is resonantly produced via the top-charm $\rho_{tc} V_{tb}$ coupling at tree level, while $H^+ \to W^+ H$ weak decay occurs within the exotic second doublet, leading eventually to same-sign dilepton signals. We perform a signal-to-background analysis at the 14 TeV LHC and show that discovery seems possible with LHC Run 2 data already at hand.