OBSERVING DOUBLY-CHARGED HIGGS BOSONS IN PHOTON-PHOTON COLLISIONS

We discuss the possibility of observing doubly charged Higgs bosons in yy collisions. We find that one can increase the range of observabili ty close to the kinematic limit by a judicious choice of the polarisat ions of the initial e(-)/e(+) beams as well as the initial laser beam photons which are made to back-scatter from the former. We also note t hat, in a large region of parameter space, the generally used lepton n umber violating decay mode is dominated by the decay into a singly cha rged Higgs and a real or virtual W-boson, giving rise to a large numbe r of fermions in the final state. This can qualitatively alter the str ategy for discovering doubly-charged scalars. (C) 1998 Published by El sevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.