Trilepton+top signal from chargino-neutralino decays of MSSM charged Higgs bosons at the LHC

We perform for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) a detailed study of charged Higgs boson production via the top-bottom quark associated mode followed by decays into a chargino and a neutralino, with masses and couplings as given by the general minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). We focus our attention on the region of parameter space with and intermediate values of , where identification of via decays into standard model (SM) particles has proven to be ineffective. Modelling the CMS detector, we find that a signature consisting of three hard leptons accompanied by a hadronically reconstructed top quark plus substantial missing transverse energy, which may result from decays, can be made viable over a large variety of initially overwhelming SM and MSSM backgrounds, provided MSSM input parameters are favourable: notably, small and light sleptons are important prerequisites. We quantify these statements by performing a fairly extensive scan of the parameter space, including realistic hadron-level simulations, and delineate some potential discovery regions.Received: 16 April 2003, Revised: 23 June 2003, Published online: 29 August 2003S. Moretti: Formerly at: Theory Division, CERN, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland and Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, UK