Search for charged Higgs bosons decaying into top and bottom quarks in lepton+jets final states in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

The CMS collaboration
Hayrapetyan, Aram , Makarenko, Vladimir , Tumasyan, Armen , Adam, Wolfgang , Benato, Lisa , Bergauer, Thomas , Dragicevic, Marko , Giordano, Cristina , Hussain, Priya Sajid , Jeitler, Manfred
CMS-B2G-24-008, 2025.

Abstract (data abstract)
A search is presented for charged Higgs bosons ($\text{H}^{\pm}$) in proton-proton (pp) collision events via the $\text{pp}\to\text{(q)H}^{\pm}$ processes with $H^{\pm}\to \text{tb}$ decays. The analysis is based on the data collected at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV with the CMS detector at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 $\text{fb}^{-1}$.Charged Higgs bosons in the 200 GeV to 1 TeV mass range are searched for. The results are interpreted within the generalized two-Higgs-doublet model (g2HDM), which predicts an $\text{H}^{\pm}$, a neutral scalar, and a pseudoscalar, featuring additional Yukawa couplings to the top quark and u-type quarks, denoted by $\rho_{tt}$, $\rho_{tc}$, and $\rho_{tu}$. Motivated by previous LHC results, the extra Yukawa coupling $\rho_{tu}$ is set to zero in this analysis. The search focuses on the real components of the additional top quark Yukawa couplings, $\rho_{tt}$ and $\rho_{tc}$, which are probed up to values of unity.An excess is observed with respect to the standard model expectation with a local significance of 2.4 standard deviations for a signal with $m_{\text{H}^{\pm}} = 600$ GeV.Exclusion limits are derived on the product of the cross section $\sigma(\text{pp}\to\text{qH}^\pm)$ and branching fraction $\mathcal{B}(\text{H}^\pm\to\text{tb}, {\text{t}\to \text{b} \text{l}\nu})$, where $\text{l}=e, \mu$, for $\rho_{tc} \gtrsim 0.15-0.5$ depending on the $m_{\text{H}^{\pm}}$ and $\rho_{tt}$ assumption. The results represent the first search for charged Higgs bosons within the g2HDM framework and complement the existing results on additional neutral Higgs bosons.

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