Associated production of heavy Higgs bosons with a $b\bar{b}$ pair in the Nonholomorphic MSSM and LHC searches

TL;DR

This paper investigates how radiative corrections in the NonHolomorphic MSSM affect heavy Higgs boson production and decay, altering LHC exclusion limits compared to the MSSM, especially at high tanβ and large soft parameters.

Contribution

It introduces the impact of NHSSM-specific parameters on heavy Higgs phenomenology and LHC constraints, extending the MSSM analysis to include radiative correction effects.

Findings

Altered exclusion regions in the m_A-tanβ plane for NHSSM.

Large negative A_b' strengthens exclusion limits, increasing m_A bounds by ~200 GeV.

Positive A_b' slightly relaxes bounds, increasing m_A by less than 100 GeV.

Abstract

In the NonHolomorphic Supersymmetric Standard Model (NHSSM), the Yukawa couplings of the bottom quark ($y_b$) and the tau lepton ($y_{\tau}$) might receive substantial supersymmetric (SUSY) radiative corrections which have prominent dependencies on the NHSSM-specific trilinear soft parameters, $A_b^\prime$ and $A_{\tau}^\prime$, respectively, in addition to their well-known dependence on $\tan\beta$ as is already present in the Minimal SUSY Standard Model (MSSM). We study to what extent these could affect the production cross sections of the heavy Higgs bosons ($H$ and $A$) in association with a pair of $b$-quarks and their decay branching ratios, in particular, to a $\tau\bar{\tau}$ pair and compare them with those obtained in the MSSM. Requiring compliance with the recently observed upper bounds on the product of their total cross-section and the branching ratio to $\tau\bar{\tau}$ at the 13 TeV run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), with data worth 139 fb$^{-1}$, results in an altered exclusion region in the customary $m_A-\tan\beta$ plane in the framework of the NHSSM when compared to what is derived by the LHC experiments within an MSSM setup. Such alterations are estimated to be pronounced only for large $\tan\beta$ ($\geq 40$) and for large, negative $A_b^\prime$ when one finds a reinforced exclusion of the $m_A-\tan\beta$ plane with an excluded $m_A$ value larger by $\approx 200$ GeV, compared to the MSSM case, at $\tan\beta=60$. On the other hand, the maximum relaxation in $m_A$, for a similarly large but positive $A_b^\prime$, barely exceeds $\approx 100$ GeV as a result of complementary variations in production cross-sections and decay branching fractions of the heavy, neutral Higgs bosons.