Decays of the MSSM Higgs Bosons with Explicit CP Violation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how explicit CP violation in the MSSM Higgs sector affects decay patterns and explores experimental signatures in tau and top quark pair decays to confirm CP violation.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of explicit CP violation on Higgs decay branching ratios and proposes methods to detect CP violation through spin correlations.

Findings

Scalar-pseudoscalar mixing significantly alters Higgs couplings.

Explicit CP violation modifies decay branching ratios.

Potential experimental signatures in tau and top pair decays.

Abstract

We study Higgs boson decays in the minimal supersymmetric standard model where the tree-level CP invariance of the Higgs potential is explicitly broken by loop effects of soft CP-violating Yukawa interactions related to scalar quarks of the third generation. The scalar-pseudoscalar mixing among two neutral CP-even Higgs bosons and one CP-odd Higgs boson due to explicit CP violation modifies their tree-level couplings to fermions, to the W^\pm and Z bosons and to Higgs bosons themselves significantly. We analyze the phenomenological impact of explicit CP violation on the branching ratios of the neutral Higgs boson decays in detail and discuss how to directly confirm the existence of explicit CP violation through \tau^+ \tau^- and t \bar{t} spin correlations in the decays of the neutral Higgs bosons into a tau-lepton pair and a top-quark pair.