Production of a light top-squark pair in association with a light non-standard Higgs boson within the NMSSM at the 13 TeV LHC and a 33 TeV proton collider

TL;DR

This study evaluates the potential for future high-energy colliders to detect a specific supersymmetric process involving light top squarks and Higgs bosons within the NMSSM, highlighting the need for higher energy colliders beyond the LHC.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the NMSSM parameter space and identifies optimal conditions and collider energies needed to observe the light top-squark pair production with a Higgs boson.

Findings

High-luminosity LHC has limited sensitivity to the process.

A 33 TeV proton collider can observe the signal with high significance.

Dominant decay mode involves top squark decaying into a b-quark and a chargino.

Abstract

We study the potential of the LHC accelerator, and a future 33 TeV proton collider, to observe the production of a light top squark pair in association with the lightest Higgs boson (${\tilde t}_1 {\tilde t}_1 h_1$), as predicted by the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM). We scan randomly about ten million points of the NMSSM parameter space, allowing all possible decays of the lightest top squark and lightest Higgs boson, with no assumptions about their decay rates, except for known physical constraints such as perturbative bounds, Dark matter relic density consistent with recent Planck experiment measurements, Higgs mass bounds on the next to lightest Higgs boson, $h_2$, assuming it is consistent with LHC measurements for the Standard Model Higgs boson, LEP bounds for the chargino mass and Z invisible width, experimental bounds on B meson rare decays and some LHC experimental bounds on SUSY particle spectra different to the particles involved in our study. We find that for low mass top-squark, the dominating decay mode is ${\tilde t}_1 \rightarrow b \tilde{\chi}_1^{\pm}$ with $\tilde{\chi}_1^{\pm} \rightarrow W^{\pm} \tilde{\chi}_1^0 $. We use three bench mark points with the highest cross sections, which naturally fall within the compressed spectra of the top squark, and make a phenomenological analysis to determine the optimal event selection that maximizes the signal significance over backgrounds. We focus on the leptonic decays of both $W$'s and the decay of lightest Higgs boson into b-quarks ($h_1 \rightarrow b \bar b$). Our results show that the high luminosity LHC will have limitations to observe the studied signal and only a proton collider with higher energy will be able to observe the SUSY scenario studied with more than three standard deviations over background.