Discovery potential for a charged Higgs boson decaying in the chargino-neutralino channel of the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Abstract.Charged Higgs boson production via the gluon-bottom quark mode, gb → $tH^{\pm}$, followed by its decay into a chargino and a neutralino has been investigated. The calculations are based on masses and couplings given by the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) for a specific choice of MSSM parameters. The signature of the signal is characterized by three hard leptons, a substantial missing transverse energy due to the decay of the neutralino and the chargino and three hard jets from the hadronic decay of the top quark. The possibility of detecting the signal over the Standard Model (SM) and non-SM backgrounds was studied for a set of $\tan\beta$ and mA. The existence of 5-$\sigma$ confidence level regions for $H^{\pm}$ discovery at integrated luminosities of 100 fb-1 and 300 fb-1 is demonstrated, which cover also the intermediate region 4 $\lesssim$$\tan\beta$$\lesssim$ 10 where $H^{\pm}$ decays to SM particles cannot be used for $H^{\pm}$ discovery.