Phenomenology of W-+/- H--/+ production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider - art. no. 055008

Barrientos Bendezu and Kniehl recently suggested that W+/-H-/+ associated p roduction may be a useful channel in the search for the elusive heavy charg ed Higgs bosons of the 2 Higgs doublet model at the CERN Large Hadron Colli der. We investigate the phenomenology of this mechanism in the minimal supe rsymmetric standard model, with special attention paid to the most likely h eavy Higgs boson decay, H-/+ --> tb --> <b(b)over bar>W-/+, and to the irre ducible background from top quark pair production. We fmd that the semilept onic signature "<b(b)over bar>W+ W- --> <b(b)over bar>jjl + missing momentu m" is dominated by top-quark-top-antiquark events, which overwhelm the char ged Higgs boson signal over the heavy mass range that can be probed at the CERN collider. [S0556-2821(99)05303-5].