Speaker
Abstract:
We investigate the prospects for the discovery of a top quark decaying into
one light Higgs boson along with a charm quark in top quark pair production
at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
A general two Higgs doublet model is adopted to study the signature
of flavor changing neutral Higgs interactions for $t \to c\phi^0$ or
$\bar{t} \to \bar{c}\phi^0$ where $\phi^0$ is a CP-even scalar ($H^0$)
or a CP-odd pseudoscalar ($A^0$).
The dominant physics background is evaluated with realistic
acceptance cuts as well as tagging and mistagging efficiencies.
We have found abundant signal events and that our acceptance cuts
reduce the physics background enough to establish a $5\sigma$ signal for
$M_\phi \alt 130$ GeV at the early stage of LHC with $\sqrt{s} = 7$ TeV
and an integrated luminosity of $10$ fb$^{-1}$.
The discovery potential will be greatly enhanced
with the full energy of $\sqrt{s} = 14$ TeV.
