Effects of Higgs sector CP violation in top-quark pair production at the LHC

Abstract

A striking manifestation of CP violation in the electroweak symmetry breaking sector would be the existence of neutral Higgs boson(s) with undefined CP parity. We analyse signatures of such a boson, with a mass of about 300 GeV or larger, produced in high energy proton-proton collisions at LHC energies in its top-quark antitop-quark decay channel. The large irreducible $t\bar t$ background is taken into account. We propose, both for the dilepton and the lepton + jets decay channels of $t\bar t$, several correlations and asymmetries with which (Higgs sector) CP violation can be traced. We show that for judiciously chosen cuts on the $t\bar t$ invariant mass these CP observables yield, for an LHC integrated luminosity of 100 $\rm{fb}^{-1}$, statistically significant signals for a range of Higgs boson masses and Yukawa couplings.