Discovery and exclusion prospects for staus produced by heavy Higgs bosons decays at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a search strategy for staus produced by heavy Higgs decays at the LHC, demonstrating its effectiveness across different mixing scenarios and providing exclusion and discovery prospects for various luminosities.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing the search strategy's performance in a complementary mixing pattern and offers updated exclusion limits and discovery prospects for the LHC.

Findings

The search strategy is sensitive to both mixing scenarios.

Heavy Higgs masses above 850 GeV can be excluded at 100 fb$^{-1}$.

Prospects for discovery improve with higher luminosity.

Abstract

In a previous work we developed a search strategy for staus produced by the decay of the heavy CP-even Higgs boson $H$ within the context of the large $\tan\beta$ regime of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) in an scenario of large stau mixing. Here we study the performance of such search strategy by confronting it with the complementary mixing pattern in which decays of both the CP-even and CP-odd heavy Higgs bosons contribute to the production of $\widetilde{\tau}_1\widetilde{\tau}_2^{*} \;+\; c.c$ pairs. Again, we focus on final states with two opposite-sign tau leptons and large missing transverse energy. We find that our proposed search strategy, although optimized for the large stau mixing scenario, is still quite sensitive to the complementary mixing pattern. For instance, with a total integrated luminosity of only 100 fb$^{-1}$ we are able to exclude heavy Higgs masses above 850 GeV for average stau masses higher than 290 GeV. We also extend the results reported in the preceding work for the large mixing scenario by including now the exclusion limits at 100 fb$^{-1}$ and the prospects both for exclusion and discovery in a potential high luminosity phase of the LHC (1000 fb$^{-1}$). Finally, we discuss the possibility to distinguish the two mixing scenarios when they share the same relevant mass spectrum and both reach the discovery level with our search strategy.