SUSY Higgs at the LHC: Large stop mixing effects and associated production

TL;DR

This paper investigates how large stop mixing in supersymmetric models affects Higgs production and decay at the LHC, highlighting alternative channels that enhance discovery prospects especially when traditional signals are suppressed.

Contribution

It demonstrates that large stop mixing enhances associated Higgs production channels and reveals new production mechanisms via stop decays, improving detection strategies.

Findings

Associated production channels become more significant when inclusive diphoton signals are reduced.

Higgs can be produced from the decay of the heaviest stop in certain scenarios.

Large stop mixing enables production of the pseudo-scalar Higgs through stop decays.

Abstract

We revisit the effect of the large stop mixing on the decay and production of the lightest SUSY Higgs at the LHC. We stress that whenever the inclusive 2-photon signature is substantially reduced, associated production, $Wh$ and $t\bar t h$, with the subsequent decay of the Higgs into photons is enhanced and becomes an even more important discovery channel. We also point out that these reductions in the inclusive channel do not occur for the smallest Higgs mass where the significance is known to be lowest. We show that in such scenarios the Higgs can be produced in the decay of the heaviest stop. For not too heavy masses of the pseudo-scalar Higgs where the inclusive channel is even further reduced, we show that large stop mixing also allows the production of the pseudo-scalar Higgs through stop decays. These large mixing scenarios therefore offer much better prospects than previously thought. As a by-product we have recalculated stop1-stop1-h production at the LHC and give a first evaluation of stop1-stop1-Z.