Search for a charged Higgs boson decaying to charm and bottom quarks in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV

A search for charged Higgs boson decaying to a charm and a bottom quark (H+→cb¯¯¯H+→cb¯) is performed using 19.7 fb−1 of pp collision data at s√=8s=8 TeV. The production mechanism investigated in this search is tt¯tt¯ pair production in which one top quark decays to a charged Higgs boson and a bottom quark and the other decays to a charged lepton, a neutrino, and a bottom quark. Charged Higgs boson decays to cb¯¯¯cb¯ are searched for, resulting in a final state containing at least four jets, a charged lepton (muon or electron), and missing transverse momentum. A kinematic fit is performed to identify the pair of jets least likely to be the bottom quarks originating from direct top quark decays and the invariant mass of this pair is used as the final observable in the search. No evidence for the presence of a charged Higgs boson is observed and upper limits at 95% confidence level of 0.8–0.5% are set on the branching fraction ℬ(t → H+b), assuming ℬ(H+ → cb¯¯¯cb¯) = 1.0 and ℬ(t → H+b) + ℬ(t → Wb) = 1.0, for the charged Higgs boson mass range 90–150 GeV.Marie-Curie programme and the European Research Council and Horizon 2020 Grant, contract No. 675440 (European Union); the Leventis Foundation; the A. P. Sloan Foundation; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office; the Fonds pour la Formation `a la Recherche dans l’Industrie et dans l’Agriculture (FRIA-Belgium); the Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie (IWT-Belgium); the F.R.S.-FNRS and FWO (Belgium) under the “Excellence of Science — EOS” — be.h project n. 30820817; the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS) of the Czech Republic; the Lendu¨let (“Momentum”) Programme and the J´anos Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the New National Excellence Program ´UNKP, the NKFIA research grants 123842, 123959, 124845, 124850 and 125105 (Hungary); the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India; the HOMING PLUS programme of the Foundation for Polish Science, cofinanced from European Union, Regional Development Fund, the Mobility Plus programme of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the National Science Center (Poland), contracts Harmonia 2014/14/M/ST2/00428, Opus 2014/13/B/ST2/02543, 2014/15/B/ST2/03998,and 2015/19/B/ST2/02861, Sonata-bis 2012/07/E/ST2/01406; the National Priorities Research Program by Qatar National Research Fund; the Programa de Excelencia Mar´ıa de Maeztu and the Programa Severo Ochoa del Principado de Asturias; the Thalis and Aristeia programmes cofinanced by EU-ESF and the Greek NSRF; the Rachadapisek Sompot Fund for Postdoctoral Fellowship, Chulalongkorn University and the Chulalongkorn Academic into Its 2nd Century Project Advancement Project (Thailand); the Welch Foundation, contract C-1845; and the Weston Havens Foundation (U.S.A.)