Light Higgs bosons in phenomenological NMSSM

TL;DR

This paper explores light Higgs bosons within the NMSSM, analyzing their properties, constraints, and LHC search prospects, providing a comparison to MSSM benchmarks and emphasizing phenomenological implications.

Contribution

It introduces simple deformations of MSSM benchmarks to realize light Higgs bosons in the NMSSM and studies their phenomenology under current experimental constraints.

Findings

Light CP-odd and charged Higgs bosons are achievable in NMSSM.

Viable parameter space consistent with collider and flavor physics constraints.

Implications for LHC searches of light Higgs bosons are discussed.

Abstract

We consider scenarios in the next-to-minimal supersymmetric model (NMSSM) where the CP-odd and charged Higgs bosons are very light. As we demonstrate, these can be obtained as simple deformations of existing phenomenological MSSM benchmarks scenarios with parameters defined at the weak scale. This offers a direct and meaningful comparison to the MSSM case. Applying a wide set of up-to-date constraints from both high-energy collider and flavour physics, the Higgs boson masses and couplings are studied in viable parts of parameter space. The LHC phenomenology of the light Higgs scenario for neutral and charged Higgs boson searches is discussed.