Light Higgs Bosons in NMSSM at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the properties and detection prospects of non-SM-like Higgs bosons in the NMSSM at the LHC, highlighting the significance of the diphoton decay mode for discovery and model differentiation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the mass spectrum, couplings, and production rates of non-SM Higgs bosons in the NMSSM considering current constraints, emphasizing the diphoton channel for detection.

Findings

Two-photon decay mode can have a large rate in certain parameter regions.

Non-SM Higgs bosons have distinctive couplings that affect their LHC signatures.

Diphoton channel offers a promising avenue for NMSSM Higgs discovery.

Abstract

The next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (NMSSM) with an extended Higgs sector offers one of the Higgs boson as the Standard model (SM) like Higgs with a mass around 125 GeV along with other Higgs bosons with lighter and heavier masses and not excluded by any current experiments. At the LHC, phenomenology of these non SM like Higgs bosons is very rich and considerably different from the other supersymmetric models. In this work, assuming one of the Higgs bosons to be the SM like, we revisit the mass spectrum and couplings of non SM like Higgs bosons taking into consideration all existing constraints and identify the relevant region of parameter space. The discovery potential of these non SM like Higgs bosons, apart from their masses, is guided by their couplings with gauge bosons and fermions which are very much parameter space sensitive. We evaluate the rates of productions of these non SM like Higgs bosons at the LHC for a variety of decay channels in the allowed region of the parameter space. Although bb, {\tau}{\tau} decay modes appear to be the most promising, it is observed that for a substantial region of parameter space the two-photon decay mode has a remarkably large rate. In this work we emphasize that this diphoton mode can be exploited to find the NMSSM Higgs signal and can also be potential avenue to distinguish the NMSSM from the MSSM. In addition, we discuss briefly the various detectable signals of these non SM Higgs bosons at the LHC.