Detection Prospects of Doubly Charged Higgs Bosons from the Higgs Triplet Model at the LHC

Abstract: In this thesis I explore the possibilities of detecting doubly charged Higgs bosons from the Higgs Triplet Model (HTM) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Higgs bosons are included into the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics in order to explain the origin of mass of the elementary particles. Even though the SM is considered to be a reliable starting point for any particle theory, no Higgs particles have to this day been found. There are therefore high expectations for the record-breaking energies of the LHC to lead to a Higgs discovery. The HTM produces seven different Higgs bosons, and among these we find the doubly charged ones. Because of their exotic charge, I focus on studying these Higgs particles in particular. To this purpose, I implement the full HTM theory as an alternative model option in standard particle physics Monte-Carlo software and then simulate LHC proton-proton collisions at a center of mass energy of 14 TeV. The investigated signal is defined as two like-signed leptons, four hard jets and missing energy in the final state. The main production mechanisms are pair-production and associated production with a singly charged Higgs. Since I choose to study a region of parameter space where the triplet vacuum expectation value is relatively large, the doubly charged Higgs decays into W's and the singly charged Higgs into WZ or tb. The results of the simulations show that the LHC could probe Higgs masses up to at least 300 GeV with an integrated luminosity of about 300 fb.1.