Search for the Single Production of Doubly-Charged Higgs Bosons and Constraints on their Couplings from Bhabha Scattering

Abstract

A search for single production of doubly-charged Higgs bosons has been performed using 600.7 pb^-1 of e+e- collision data with sqrt(s)=189--209GeV collected by the OPAL detector at LEP. No evidence for the existence of H++/-- is observed. Upper limits on the Yukawa coupling of the H++/-- to like-signed electron pairs are derived. Additionally, indirect constraints on the Yukawa coupling from Bhabha scattering, where the H++/-- would contribute via t-channel exchange, are derived for M(H++/--) < 2TeV. These are the first results for both a single production search and constraints from Bhabha scattering reported from LEP.