Search for Charged Higgs Bosons Produced via Vector Boson Fusion and Decaying into a Pair of $W$ and $Z$ Bosons Using $pp$ Collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13\mathrm{TeV}$

A search for charged Higgs bosons produced via vector boson fusion and decaying into $W$ and $Z$ bosons using proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13\mathrm{TeV}$ is presented. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of $15.2{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ collected with the CMS detector in 2015 and 2016. The event selection requires three leptons (electrons or muons), two jets with large pseudorapidity separation and high dijet mass, and missing transverse momentum. The observation agrees with the standard model prediction. Limits on the vector boson fusion production cross section times branching fraction for new charged physical states are reported as a function of mass from 200 to 2000 GeV and interpreted in the context of Higgs triplet models.

Figure 1

Example of a Feynman diagram showing the production of charged Higgs bosons via VBF.

Figure 2

Transverse mass distributions after full selection, for data collected in 2015 (left) and 2016 (right). The background yield predictions correspond to the background-only hypothesis fit result. The signal distribution is shown for $m(H^{\pm })=700\mathrm{GeV}$ and the cross-section prediction in the GM model at $s_H=0.7$.

Figure 3

Expected and observed exclusion limits at 95% confidence level as a function of $m(H^{\pm })$ for ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{VBF}}(H^{\pm })\mathcal{B}(H^{\pm }\to WZ)$ (left) and on the ratio of vacuum expectation values in the GM model (right) for $15.2{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV collected in 2015 and 2016. The blue shaded area covers the theoretically not allowed parameter space [80].