Search for charged Higgs bosons decaying into top and bottom quarks at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract

A search for charged Higgs bosons heavier than the top quark and decaying via $H^{\pm }\to tb$ is presented. The data analysed corresponds to 36.1 fb${}^{-1}$ of $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV and was recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2015 and 2016. The production of a charged Higgs boson in association with a top quark and a bottom quark, $pp\to tb{H}^{\pm }$, is explored in the mass range from $m_{H^{\pm }}$ = 200 to 2000 GeV using multi-jet final states with one or two electrons or muons. Events are categorised according to the multiplicity of jets and how likely these are to have originated from hadronisation of a bottom quark. Multivariate techniques are used to discriminate between signal and background events. No significant excess above the background-only hypothesis is observed and exclusion limits are derived for the production cross-section times branching fraction of a charged Higgs boson as a function of its mass, which range from 2.9 pb at $m_{H^{\pm }}$ = 200 GeV to 0.070 pb at $m_{H^{\pm }}$ = 2000 GeV. The results are interpreted in two benchmark scenarios of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.

55 pages in total, author list starting page 39, 10 figures, 6 tables, published in JHEP. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HIGG-2017-04/. HEPdata: https://www.hepdata.net/record/83203