Identification and estimated yield of background events in a search for a doubly charged Higgs boson at CMS

A variety of exotic models predict a doubly charged Higgs-like particle that can be pair-produced in hadronic interactions via a Drell-Yan-like mechanism. The H++ and H-- can each decay to a pair of like-sign leptons (muons or electrons in this study) with TeV-scale mass, providing a distinctive event signature. The small background makes it challenging to predict it well. We studied Monte Carlo events to determine the source of background events and construct a background estimate from the results.