The phenomenology of $W^\pm H^\mp$ production at the Large Hadron Collider

Barrientos Bendezu' and Kniehl [hep-ph/9807480] recently suggested that $W^\pm H^\mp$ associated production may be a useful channel in the search for the elusive heavy charged Higgs bosons of the 2 Higgs Doublet Model at the Large Hadron Collider. We investigate the phenomenology of this mechanism in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, with special attention paid to the most likely heavy Higgs decay, $H^\mp\to tb\to b\bar b W^\mp$, and to the irreducible background from top pair production. We find that the semi-leptonic signature `$b\bar b W^+W^-\to b\bar b jj \ell$ + missing momentum' is dominated by top-antitop events, which overwhelm the charged Higgs signal over the heavy mass range that can be probed at the CERN collider