Discovering Higgs Bosons of the MSSM using Jet Substructure

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new jet substructure technique to discover MSSM Higgs bosons at the LHC, focusing on boosted Higgs decays from superpartner cascades, potentially enabling the $b\bar{b}$ mode as a discovery channel.

Contribution

It introduces a novel jet substructure method tailored for boosted MSSM Higgs detection from superpartner decay cascades at the LHC.

Findings

Boosted Higgs bosons can be effectively identified using jet substructure techniques.

The $b\bar{b}$ decay mode can serve as a viable discovery channel for the MSSM Higgs.

Signal significance is high enough with 10 fb$^{-1}$ of data for certain superpartner mass hierarchies.

Abstract

We present a qualitatively new approach to discover Higgs bosons of the MSSM at the LHC using jet substructure techniques applied to boosted Higgs decays. These techniques are ideally suited to the MSSM, since the lightest Higgs boson overwhelmingly decays to $b\bar{b}$ throughout the entire parameter space, while the heavier neutral Higgs bosons, if light enough to be produced in a cascade, also predominantly decay to $b\bar{b}$. The Higgs production we consider arises from superpartner production where superpartners cascade decay into Higgs bosons. We study this mode of Higgs production for several superpartner hierarchies: $m_{\tilde{q}}, m_{\tilde g} > m_{\tilde{W},\tilde{B}} > m_h + \mu$; $m_{\tilde{q}}, m_{\tilde g} > m_{\tilde{W},\tilde{B}} > m_{h,H,A} + \mu$; and $m_{\tilde{q}}, m_{\tilde g} > m_{\tilde{W}} > m_h + \mu$ with $m_{\tilde{B}} \simeq \mu$. In these cascades, the Higgs bosons are boosted, with $p_T > 200$ GeV a large fraction of the time. Since Higgs bosons appear in cascades originating from squarks and/or gluinos, the cross section for events with at least one Higgs boson can be the same order as squark/gluino production. Given 10 fb$^{-1}$ of 14 TeV LHC data, with $m_{\tilde{q}} \lsim 1$ TeV, and one of the above superpartner mass hierarchies, our estimate of $S/\sqrt{B}$ of the Higgs signal is sufficiently high that the $b\bar{b}$ mode can become the discovery mode of the lightest Higgs boson of the MSSM.