Probing doubly charged Higgs bosons at the LHC through photon initiated processes

We show that the photon-photon fusion process contributes significantly to the pair production of doubly charged Higgs bosons at the LHC at a level comparable to the Drell-Yan production. We reinterpret the ATLAS lower limit of 570 GeV (420 GeV) on the mass of Delta(+/-+/-)(L) (Delta(+/-+/-)(R)) arising from an SU(2)(L) triplet (singlet) scalar by including the photon-initiated process, and we derive a new lower limit of 748 GeV (570 GeV), assuming that Delta(+/-+/-) decays into e(+/-)e(+/-) 100% of the time. We have also shown that the 5 sigma discovery reach for Delta(+/-+/-)(L) (Delta(+/-+/-)(R)) is 846 GeV (783 GeV) with 100 fb(-1) luminosity at the 13 TeV LHC. We derive a somewhat more stringent limit on the mass when the doubly charged scalar arises from higher-dimensional representations of SU(2)(L).