Charming Top Decays with Flavor Changing Neutral Higgs Boson and WW at Hadron Colliders

Abstract: We investigate the prospects for discovering a top quark decaying into one light Higgs boson ($h^0$) along with a charm quark ($c$) in top quark pair production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and future hadron colliers. A general two Higgs doublet model is adopted to study the signature of flavor changing neutral Higgs (FCNH) interactions with $t \to c h^0$, followed by $h^0 \to WW^* \to \ell^+ \ell^- +\notE_T$, where $h^0$ is the CP-even Higgs boson and $\notE_T$ stands for missing transverse energy from neutrinos. We study the discovery potential for this FCNH signal and physics background from dominant processes with realistic acceptance cuts as well as tagging and mistagging efficiencies. Promising results are found for the LHC running at 13 TeV and 14 TeV center-of-mass energy as well as future pp colliders at 27 TeV and 100 TeV.