Precise Predictions for Higgs Production in Neutralino Decays in the Complex MSSM

TL;DR

This paper provides the most precise one-loop predictions for neutralino decays into Higgs bosons in the MSSM, including CP-violating effects, with significant implications for detecting light Higgs bosons in supersymmetric cascade decays.

Contribution

It develops a comprehensive on-shell renormalisation scheme for the chargino-neutralino sector with complex parameters and combines vertex and propagator corrections for improved accuracy.

Findings

Vertex corrections can significantly alter decay widths and branching ratios.

In the CPX scenario, corrections to decay width can reach about 45%.

Large branching ratios for chi^0_2 -> chi^0_1 h_1 suggest promising detection prospects.

Abstract

Complete one-loop results are obtained for the class of processes chi^0_i->chi^0_j h_a in the MSSM where all parameters entering this process beyond lowest order are allowed to have arbitrary CP-violating phases. An on-shell renormalisation scheme is worked out for the chargino-neutralino sector that properly takes account of imaginary parts arising from complex parameters and from absorptive parts of loop integrals. The genuine vertex contributions to the neutralino decay amplitudes are combined with two-loop propagator-type corrections for the outgoing Higgs boson. In this way the currently most precise prediction for this class of processes is obtained. The numerical impact of the genuine vertex corrections is studied for several examples of CP-conserving and CP-violating scenarios. We find that significant effects on the decay widths and branching ratios are possible even in the CP-conserving MSSM. In the CP-violating CPX benchmark scenario the corrections to the decay width are found to be particularly large, namely, of order 45% for a Higgs mass of 40 GeV. This parameter region of the CPX scenario where a very light Higgs boson is unexcluded by present data is analysed in detail. We find that in this parameter region, which will be difficult to cover by standard Higgs search channels at the LHC, the branching ratio for the decay chi^0_2->chi^0_1 h_1 is large. This may offer good prospects to detect such a light Higgs boson in cascade decays of supersymmetric particles.