Trilepton+top signal from chargino-neutralino decays of MSSM charged Higgs bosons at the LHC

Abstract.We perform for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) a detailed study of charged Higgs boson production via the top-bottom quark associated mode followed by decays into a chargino and a neutralino, with masses and couplings as given by the general minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). We focus our attention on the region of parameter space with $m_{H^{\pm}} > m_t$ and intermediate values of $\tan\beta$, where identification of $H^{\pm}$ via decays into standard model (SM) particles has proven to be ineffective. Modelling the CMS detector, we find that a signature consisting of three hard leptons accompanied by a hadronically reconstructed top quark plus substantial missing transverse energy, which may result from $H^{\pm} \rightarrow {{\widetilde\chi}}_{1,2}^{\pm} {{\widetilde\chi}}_{1,2,3,4}^0$ decays, can be made viable over a large variety of initially overwhelming SM and MSSM backgrounds, provided MSSM input parameters are favourable: notably, small $\vert \mu \vert$ and light sleptons are important prerequisites. We quantify these statements by performing a fairly extensive scan of the parameter space, including realistic hadron-level simulations, and delineate some potential discovery regions.