Discovery Potential for Doubly Charged Higgs Bosons in e^+e^- Collisions at LEP

Abstract

We study the discovery limits for doubly charged Higgs bosons, Delta^{--}, obtainable at the LEP e^+e^- collider. We expect that the LEP2 collaborations can rule out the existence of a doubly charged Higgs boson of mass below about 190 GeV for Yukawa couplings greater than 0.1. However, even for larger values of M_Delta, evidence for the Delta can be seen due to contributions from virtual intermediate Delta's provided they have relatively large values of the Yukawa couplings.