The Gold-Plated Channel for Supersymmetric Higgs via Higgsphilic Z'

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method to discover the Higgs boson early at the LHC by detecting a Higgsphilic Z' boson decaying into leptons, which can also reveal supersymmetry signals even with heavy superpartners.

Contribution

The paper introduces an effective model for a Higgsphilic Z' boson with minimal fermion couplings, enabling early Higgs and supersymmetry detection strategies at the LHC.

Findings

Higgs boson can be discovered early via Z' decays into leptons.

Supersymmetry signals can be identified through Z' in events with leptons and missing energy.

Long-lived Z' detection is feasible with existing ATLAS trigger strategies.

Abstract

The lightest CP-even Higgs boson in weak-scale supersymmetry can be discovered spectacularly early, even from 1 inverse fb of data at 7 TeV LHC, if it decays to a pair of light Z', which in turn, decays to a pair of hard and "isolated" leptons. These Z' must have infinitesimal couplings to light fermions in order to be consistent with precision electroweak constraints, while they have mild to moderate couplings to Higgs. Hence they are Higgsphilic. A Z' with these properties appears at the electroweak scale in the "viable" gravity mediated supersymmetry breaking. We construct an effective model to extract the Z' phenomenology. Even in a decoupled limit where all gauginos and sfermions are heavy and supersymmetry production is purely electroweak, we find that the Higgs boson as well as supersymmetry can be found early through the discovery of Z' in samples of events with 4 leptons and 4 leptons + missing energy respectively. Additionally, in cases where the Z' is long-lived, we show that the trigger menus employed at the ATLAS detector to find long lived particles are capable of finding thousands of Higgs events from 1 inverse fb of data.