Pair production of charged Higgs scalars from electroweak gauge boson fusion

We compute the contribution to charged Higgs boson pair production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) due to the scattering of two electroweak (EW) gauge bosons, these being in turn generated via bremsstrahlung off incoming quarks and antiquarks: $q\bar q\to q\bar q V^*V^*\to q\bar q H^+H^-$ ($V=\gamma,Z,W^\pm$). We verify that the production cross section of this mode is $\tan\beta$ independent and show that it is smaller than that of $H^+H^-$ production via $q\bar q$-initiated processes but generally larger than that of the loop-induced channel $gg\to H^+H^-$.