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→cϕ0, where ϕ0 could be CP-even (H0) or CP-odd (A0). 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 (λtc/λt≳0.09), the abundance of signal events and the reduction in physics background allow us to establish a 5σ signal for Mϕ∼125 GeV at the LHC with a center of mass energy (s) of 8 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 20 fb−1. The discovery potential will be greatly enhanced with the full energy of s=14 TeV.