Potential discovery of staus through heavy Higgs boson decays at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new LHC search strategy for staus via heavy Higgs boson decays, exploiting large production cross sections in high tanβ regions, leading to potential discovery with current collider capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel search method for staus through heavy Higgs decays, bypassing traditional tau pair decay channels, and demonstrates its effectiveness at the upcoming LHC run.

Findings

Significance of the signal can reach 5σ at 14 TeV with 100 fb$^{-1}$.

Heavy Higgs decay channels significantly enhance stau detection prospects.

The strategy is effective in high tanβ regions avoiding existing constraints.

Abstract

In this work we present a new search strategy for the discovery of staus at the LHC in the context of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. The search profits from the large s-channel $b$-quark annihilation production of the heavy CP-even and CP-odd Higgs bosons (H/A) which can be attained in regions of $\tan\beta\gg 1$ that avoid the stringent $H/A \to \tau^+ \tau^-$ searches via decays into stau pairs. We also focus on regions where the staus branching ratios are dominated by the decays into a tau lepton and the lightest neutralino. Thus the experimental signature consists of final states made up of a tau-lepton pair plus large missing transverse energy. We take advantage of the large stau-pair production cross sections via heavy Higgs boson decays, which are between one or two orders of magnitude larger than the usual electroweak production cross sections for staus. A set of basic cuts allow us to obtain significances of the signal over the SM backgrounds at the discovery level (5 standard deviations) in the next LHC run with a center-of-mass energy of 14 TeV and a total integrated luminosity of only 100 fb$^{-1}$.