Tau-jet signatures of vectorlike quark decays to heavy charged and neutral Higgs bosons

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of the Large Hadron Collider to detect heavy Higgs bosons and vectorlike quarks through specific multi-b and tau signatures, providing new search strategies and sensitivity estimates.

Contribution

It introduces novel search strategies for heavy Higgs and vectorlike quark decays involving multiple b-jets and taus, and assesses LHC reach in a model-independent framework.

Findings

LHC can probe heavy Higgs and vectorlike quark masses above 2 TeV.

Sensitivity is significant across a wide range of tanβ values.

Combined analysis extends the discovery potential for these particles.

Abstract

We study $4b+2\tau$ and $4b+1\tau$ signatures of heavy neutral and charged Higgs bosons originating from cascade decays of pair-produced new quarks. Decays of vectorlike quarks through heavy Higgses can easily dominate in the two Higgs doublet model of type-II, and the studied signatures are common to many possible decay chains. We design search strategies for these final states and discuss the mass ranges of heavy Higgs bosons and new quarks that can be explored at the Large Hadron Collider as functions of branching ratios in a model independent way. We further combine the results with a similar study focusing on decays which lead to a $6b$ final state and interpret the sensitivity to charged and neutral Higgs bosons and vectorlike quarks in the type-II two Higgs doublet model. We find that the LHC reach for their masses extends to well above 2 TeV in the case of an SU(2) doublet quark and to at least 1.8 TeV for a bottom-like SU(2) singlet quark in the whole range of $\tan\beta$ between 1 and 50.