MSSM Higgs-Boson Production at Hadron Colliders with Explicit CP Violation

TL;DR

This paper explores how CP-violating phases influence Higgs boson production via gluon fusion in the MSSM, highlighting significant effects on production rates due to scalar-pseudoscalar mixing and loop contributions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of CP-violating effects on Higgs production rates, including sfermion loops and scalar-pseudoscalar mixing, within the MSSM framework.

Findings

CP phases significantly alter Higgs production rates.

Neutral Higgs mixing impacts lightest Higgs production.

Loop contributions from stops and sbottoms are affected by CP phases.

Abstract

Gluon fusion is the main production mechanism for Higgs bosons with masses up to several hundred GeV in $pp$ collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We investigate the effects of the CP-violating phases on the fusion process including both the sfermion-loop contributions and the one-loop induced CP-violating scalar-pseudoscalar mixing in the minimal supersymmetric standard model. With a universal trilinear parameter assumed, every physical observable involves only the sum of the phases of the universal trilinear parameter $A$ and the higgsino mass parameter $\mu$. The phase affects the lightest Higgs-boson production rate significantly through the neutral Higgs-boson mixing and, for the masses around the lightest stop-pair threshold, it also changes the production rate of the heavy Higgs bosons significantly through both the stop and sbottom loops and the neutral Higgs-boson mixing.