Testing lepton-flavor-violating decay of doubly charged Higgs bosons in type-II seesaw via photon fusion at the high-energy LHC

Abstract

Tiny neutrino masses can be explained by the type-II seesaw mechanism, where a triplet scalar under $SU(2)_{L}$ is predicted. Collider searches for this exotic scalar have been extensively conducted, especially for its doubly charged component $Δ^{\pm\pm}$. Utilizing the forward detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), we study the probing sensitivity for the elastic photon fusion production of the scalars $pp\to p(γγ\toΔ^{++}Δ^{--})p$ followed by the lepton-flavor-violating (LFV) decay channels $Δ^{\pm\pm}\to e^{\pm}μ^{\pm}$. With a high center-of-mass energy of 100 TeV and several luminosity scenarios, we can extensively broaden the exclusion bounds in the parametric space of Br$(Δ^{\pm\pm}\to e^{\pm}μ^{\pm})$ versus the triplet scalar mass $m_Δ$. Specifically, at the 100 TeV LHC with an integrated luminosity of 3 ab$^{-1}$, the mass exclusion limit at 95\% C.L. can reach around 1150 GeV with the assumption of inverted neutrino mass hierarchy.