Pseudoscalar Higgs Bosons at the LHC: Production and Decays into Electroweak Gauge Bosons Revisited

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the production and decay rates of heavy pseudoscalar Higgs bosons into electroweak gauge bosons at the LHC across various SM extensions, highlighting potential observability in certain models.

Contribution

It provides detailed cross section calculations for pseudoscalar Higgs bosons in multiple models, considering current experimental constraints, and compares them to scalar counterparts.

Findings

Most models allow observable cross sections for pseudoscalar decays into gauge bosons.

The MSSM predicts smaller, less observable cross sections.

Other models like 2HDM and technicolor show promising signals.

Abstract

We analyze and compute, within a number of standard model (SM) extensions, the cross sections $\sigma_{A\to VV'}$ for the production of a heavy neutral pseudoscalar Higgs boson/spin-zero resonance at the LHC and its subsequent decays into electroweak gauge bosons. For comparison we calculate also the corresponding cross sections for a heavy scalar. The SM extensions we consider include a type-II two-Higgs doublet model (2HDM), a 2HDM with 4 chiral fermion generations, the minimal supersymmetric extension of the SM (MSSM), and top-color assisted technicolour models. Presently available phenomenological constraints on the parameters of these models are taken into account. We find that, with the exception of the MSSM, these models permit the LHC cross sections $\sigma_{A\to VV'}$ to be of observable size. That is, a pseudoscalar resonance may be observable, if it exists, at the LHC in its decays into electroweak gauge bosons, in particular in $WW$ and $\gamma \gamma$ final states.