Fermiophobic Higgs boson and supersymmetry

TL;DR

This paper explores a fermiophobic NMSSM scenario where a light Higgs boson avoids traditional fermion couplings, relaxing naturalness constraints and providing new insights into dark matter and collider phenomenology.

Contribution

It formulates a minimal supersymmetric fermiophobic Higgs model within the NMSSM, addressing naturalness, dark matter, and collider constraints, and proposes a new mechanism for fermion mass generation.

Findings

Fermiophobic NMSSM relaxes naturalness criteria, allowing TeV-scale sparticles.

Modified Higgs decay branching ratios improve fit to collider data.

Dark matter direct detection signals are suppressed, consistent with XENON100 results.

Abstract

If a light Higgs boson with mass 125 GeV is fermiophobic, or partially fermiophobic, then the MSSM is excluded. The minimal supersymmetric fermiophobic Higgs scenario can naturally be formulated in the context of the NMSSM that admits Z_3 discrete symmetries. In the fermiophobic NMSSM, the SUSY naturalness criteria are relaxed by a factor N_c y_t^4/g^4 \sim 25, removing the little hierarchy problem and allowing sparticle masses to be naturally of order 2--3 TeV. This scale motivates wino or higgsino dark matter. The SUSY flavour and CP problems as well as the constraints on sparticle and Higgs boson masses from b \to s\gamma, B_s \to \mu\mu\ and direct LHC searches are relaxed in fermiophobic NMSSM. The price to pay is that a new, yet unknown, mechanism must be introduced to generate fermion masses. We show that in the fermiophobic NMSSM the radiative Higgs boson branchings to \gamma\gamma, \gamma Z can be modified compared to the fermiophobic and ordinary standard model predictions, and fit present collider data better. Suppression of dark matter scattering off nuclei explains the absence of signal in XENON100.