# Light exotic Higgs bosons at the LHC

## TL;DR

This paper explores the potential for detecting light exotic Higgs bosons, specifically pseudoscalars, at the LHC Run-II within extended Higgs sector models, emphasizing alternative search channels beyond conventional methods.

## Contribution

It analyzes novel search strategies for light pseudoscalar Higgs bosons in extended models at the LHC, focusing on atypical production modes and decay channels.

## Key findings

- Potential detection channels identified for light pseudoscalars.
- Enhanced search strategies could reveal Higgs bosons missed by traditional methods.
- Phenomenological analysis applicable to NMSSM and Type-I 2HDM models.

## Abstract

Most models of new physics contain extended Higgs sectors with multiple Higgs bosons. The observation of an additional Higgs boson, besides the $\sim 125$ GeV `$h_{\rm obs}$', will thus serve as an irrefutable evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). However, even when fairly light, these additional Higgs bosons may have escaped detection at the Large Electron-Positron collider, the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hitherto, owing to their highly reduced couplings to the SM particles. Therefore, in addition to the searches based on the conventional production processes of these Higgs bosons, such as gluon or vector boson fusion, possible new search modes need to be exploited at collider experiments in order to establish their signatures. We investigate here the phenomenology of pseudoscalars, with masses ranging from $\mathcal{O}$(1) GeV to about 150 GeV, in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric SM and the Type-I 2-Higgs Doublet Model in some such atypical search channels at the LHC Run-II.