Top Decays with Flavor Changing Neutral Higgs Interactions at the LHC

We investigate the prospects for discovering a top quark decaying into one light Higgs boson along with a charm quark in top quark pair production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A general two Higgs doublet model is adopted to study the signature of flavor changing neutral Higgs decay $t \to cϕ^0$, %or $\bar{t} \to \bar{c}ϕ^0$ where $ϕ^0$ could be CP-even ($H^0$) or CP-odd ($A^0$). The dominant physics background is evaluated with realistic acceptance cuts as well as tagging and mistagging efficiencies. For a reasonably large top-charm-Higgs coupling ($λ_{tc}/λ_{t} \agt 0.09$), the abundance of signal events and the %that our acceptance cuts reduction in physics background allow us to establish a $5σ$ signal for $M_ϕ\sim 125$ GeV at the LHC with a center of mass energy ($\sqrt{s}$) of 8 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 20 fb$^{-1}$. The discovery potential will be greatly enhanced with the full energy of $\sqrt{s} = 14$ TeV.

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