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.