Pair production of charged Higgs scalars from electroweak gauge boson fusion

Abstract

We compute the contribution to charged Higgs boson pair production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) due to the scattering of two electroweak (EW) gauge bosons, these being in turn generated via bremsstrahlung off incoming quarks: q q --> q q V^*V^* --> q q H^+H^- (V=gamma,Z,W^{+/-}). We verify that the production cross section of this mode is tan beta independent and show that it is smaller than that of H^+H^- production via q q-initiated processes but generally larger than that of the loop-induced channel gg --> H^+H^-. Pair production of charged Higgs bosons is crucial in order to test EW symmetry breaking scenarios beyond the Standard Model (SM). We show that the detection of these kind of processes at the standard LHC is however problematic, because of their poor production rates and the large backgrounds.