Vacuum Stability and Higgs Diphoton Decays in the MSSM

TL;DR

This paper explores how the MSSM can explain the observed Higgs diphoton decay rate enhancement at the LHC, considering vacuum stability constraints and the role of large stau mixing and tanβ.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of vacuum stability in the MSSM with highly mixed light staus, including tau Yukawa corrections and tanβ effects, to explain Higgs diphoton decay enhancements.

Findings

Enhancement of up to 50% in Higgs to diphoton decay width is possible at large tanβ.

Vacuum metastability constrains the extent of possible decay width enhancement.

Very large enhancements require non-perturbative tau Yukawa couplings, indicating new physics beyond MSSM.

Abstract

Current Higgs data at the Large Hadron Collider is compatible with a SM signal at the 2$\sigma$ level, but the central value of the signal strength in the diphoton channel is enhanced with respect to the SM expectation. If the enhancement resides in the diphoton partial decay width, the data could be accommodated in the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with highly mixed light staus. We revisit the issue of vacuum instability induced by large mixing in the stau sector, including effects of a radiatively-corrected tau Yukawa coupling. Further, we emphasize the importance of taking into account the $\tan\beta$ dependence in the stability bound. While the metastability of the Universe constrains the possible enhancement in the Higgs to diphoton decay width in the light stau scenario, an increase of the order of 50% can be achieved in the region of large $\tan\beta$. Larger enhancements may be obtained, but would require values of $\tan\beta$ associated with non-perturbative values of the tau Yukawa coupling at scales below the GUT scale, thereby implying the presence of new physics beyond the MSSM.