Revisiting the constraints on the Supersymmetric Higgs sector at the Tevatron

TL;DR

This paper reevaluates the production rates of neutral Higgs bosons in the MSSM at the Tevatron, revealing that previous experimental constraints may be overly restrictive due to underestimated theoretical uncertainties.

Contribution

It provides updated cross sections and decay rates for MSSM Higgs production at the Tevatron, incorporating significant theoretical uncertainties often neglected in experimental analyses.

Findings

Updated production cross sections are lower at high masses.

Theoretical uncertainties are large and impact experimental constraints.

Constraints on the MSSM Higgs sector are less stringent than previously thought.

Abstract

We analyze the production of the neutral Higgs particles of the Minimal Supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. We consider the two main production and detection channels: gluon--gluon and bottom quark fusion leading to Higgs bosons which subsequently decay into tau leptons, $gg, b\bar b \to {\rm Higgs} \to \tau^+\tau^-$. We update the production cross sections and the decay branching ratios and obtain production rates that are significantly smaller at high masses than the ones used by the CDF and D0 experiments in their search. We then evaluate the various theoretical uncertainties that affect these rates, uncertainties that have not been been considered in the experimental analyses and which turn out to be rather large. Including these two effects will significantly loosen the constraints obtained on the supersymmetric Higgs sector at the Tevatron.