Detecting Heavy Higgs Bosons from Natural SUSY at a 100 TeV Hadron Collider

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential to discover heavy Higgs bosons decaying into electroweakinos at a 100 TeV collider, highlighting the challenges and proposing advanced analysis techniques for detection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis strategy for detecting heavy Higgs bosons decaying into electroweakinos at future colliders, extending the discovery reach beyond traditional methods.

Findings

Discovery potential for heavy Higgs bosons up to 1.65 TeV with conventional methods.

Boosted decision trees significantly improve detection sensitivity, reaching 1-2 TeV mass range.

Heavy Higgs decays to electroweakinos can be a promising discovery channel at future colliders.

Abstract

Supersymmetric models with radiatively-driven naturalness (RNS) enjoy low electroweak fine-tuning whilst respecting LHC search limits on gluinos and top squarks and allowing for $m_h\simeq 125$ GeV. While the heavier Higgs bosons $H,\ A$ may have TeV-scale masses, the SUSY conserving $\mu$ parameter must lie in the few hundred GeV range. Thus, in natural SUSY models there should occur large heavy Higgs boson branching fractions to electroweakinos, with Higgs boson decays to higgsino plus gaugino dominating when they are kinematically accessible. These SUSY decays can open up new avenues for discovery. We investigate the prospects of discovering heavy neutral Higgs bosons $H$ and $A$ decaying into light plus heavy chargino pairs which can yield a four isolated lepton plus missing transverse energy signature at the LHC and at a future 100 TeV $pp$ collider. We find that discovery of heavy Higgs decay to electroweakinos via its $4\ell$ decay mode is very difficult at HL-LHC. For FCC-hh or SPPC, we study the $H,\ A \to $ SUSY reaction along with dominant physics backgrounds from the Standard Model and devise suitable selection requirements to extract a clean signal for FCC-hh or SPPC with $\sqrt{s}=100$ TeV, assuming an integrated luminosity of 15 $ab^{-1}$. We find that while a conventional cut-and-count analysis yields a signal statistical significance greater than $5\sigma$ for $m_{A,H}\sim 1.1-1.65$ TeV, a boosted-decision-tree analysis allows for heavy Higgs signal discovery at FCC-hh or SPPC for $m_{A,H}\sim 1-2$ TeV.