Investigating light NMSSM pseudoscalar states with boosted ditau tagging

TL;DR

This paper explores the detection of light pseudoscalar Higgs bosons in the NMSSM at the LHC, utilizing boosted ditau tagging techniques to improve sensitivity in specific supersymmetric scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel boosted ditau tagging method to identify light pseudoscalar Higgs bosons in NMSSM scenarios at the LHC, enhancing detection prospects.

Findings

Boosted ditau tagging improves detection sensitivity.

LHC can probe pseudoscalar masses below twice the bottom quark mass.

Analysis covers 20 to 50 fb$^{-1}$}

Abstract

We study a class of realizations of the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model that is motivated by dark matter and Higgs data, and in which the lightest pseudoscalar Higgs boson mass is smaller than twice the bottom quark mass and greater than twice the tau lepton mass. In such scenarios, the lightest pseudoscalar Higgs boson can be copiously produced at the LHC from the decay of heavier superpartners and will dominantly further decay into a pair of tau leptons that is generally boosted. We make use of a boosted object tagging technique designed to tag such a ditau jet, and estimate the sensitivity of the LHC to the considered supersymmetric scenarios with 20 to 50~fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13~TeV.