Search for Higgs Bosons in SUSY Cascade Decays and Neutralino Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential for detecting the light Higgs boson in the MSSM via boosted Higgs signatures in supersymmetric decay chains, especially in regions compatible with neutralino dark matter, highlighting promising experimental prospects.

Contribution

It analyzes the conditions under which boosted Higgs bosons can be observed in the MSSM, considering dark matter constraints and various supersymmetric particle mass scenarios.

Findings

Boosted Higgs bosons are common in the MSSM when sleptons are heavier than the second lightest neutralinos.

Observation prospects are excellent for the light MSSM Higgs in dark matter-compatible parameter regions.

The study emphasizes the importance of non-standard Higgs, slepton, and squark masses in detection strategies.

Abstract

The Minimal Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model (MSSM) is a well motivated theoretical framework, which contains an extended Higgs sector, including a light Higgs with Standard Model-like properties in most of the parameter space. Due to the large QCD background, searches for such a Higgs, decaying into a pair of bottom quarks, is very challenging at the LHC. It has been long realized that the situation may be ameliorated by searching for Higgs bosons in supersymmetric decay chains. Moreover, it has been recently suggested that the bobber decay channel may be observed in standard production channels by selecting boosted Higgs bosons, which may be easily identified from the QCD background. Such boosted Higgs bosons are frequent in the MSSM, since they are produced from decays of heavy colored supersymmetric particles. Previous works have emphasized the possibility of observing boosted Higgs bosons in the light higgsino region. In this work, we study the same question in the regions of parameter space consistent with a neutralino dark matter relic density, analyzing its dependence on the non-standard Higgs boson, slepton and squark masses, as well as on the condition of gaugino mass unification. In general, we conclude that, provided sleptons are heavier than the second lightest neutralinos, the presence of boosted Higgs is a common MSSM feature, implying excellent prospects for observation of the light MSSM Higgs boson in the near future.