SUSY Background to Neutral MSSM Higgs Boson Searches

TL;DR

This paper investigates the MSSM supersymmetric backgrounds affecting Higgs boson searches via vector boson fusion, identifying key processes and proposing cuts to reduce these backgrounds, with implications for current squark mass limits.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of MSSM background processes for Higgs searches, including both irreducible and reducible backgrounds, and discusses strategies for their reduction.

Findings

Light chargino and neutralino production are significant backgrounds.

MSSM backgrounds are small at current squark mass limits.

Additional cuts can effectively reduce MSSM background signals.

Abstract

Within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) the production and decay of superpartners can give rise to backgrounds for Higgs boson searches. Here MSSM background processes to the vector boson fusion channel with the Higgs boson decaying into two tau leptons or two W-bosons are investigated, giving rise to dilepton plus missing transverse momentum signals of the Higgs boson. Starting from a scenario with relatively small masses of the supersymmetric (SUSY) particles, with concomitant large cross section of the background processes, one obtains a first conservative estimate of the background. Light chargino pair production plus two jets, lightest and next-to-lightest neutralino production plus two jets as well as slepton pair production plus two jets are identified as important contributions to the irreducible SUSY background. Light chargino and next-to-lightest neutralino production plus two jets and next-to-lightest neutralino pair production plus two jets give rise to reducible backgrounds, which can be larger than the irreducible ones in some scenarios. The relevant distributions are shown and additional cuts for MSSM background reduction are discussed. Extrapolation to larger squark masses is performed and shows that MSSM backgrounds are quite small for squark masses at the current exclusion limits.