Published November 1, 2010 | Version v1
Journal article

Discovering Higgs bosons of the MSSM using jet substructure

  • 1. Department of Physics, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403 (United States)
  • 2. Theoretical Physics Department, Fermilab, Batavia, Illinois 60510 (United States)

Description

We present a qualitatively new approach to discover Higgs bosons of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) at the LHC using jet substructure techniques applied to boosted Higgs decays. These techniques are ideally suited to the MSSM, since the lightest Higgs boson overwhelmingly decays to bb throughout the entire parameter space, while the heavier neutral Higgs bosons, if light enough to be produced in a cascade, also predominantly decay to bb. The Higgs production we consider arises from superpartner production where superpartners cascade decay into Higgs bosons. We study this mode of Higgs production for several superpartner hierarchies: mq-tilde, mg-tilde>mW-tilde,B-tilde>mh+μ; mq-tilde, mg-tilde>mW-tilde,B-tilde>mh,H,A+μ; and mq-tilde, mg-tilde>mW-tilde>mh+μ with mB-tilde≅μ. In these cascades, the Higgs bosons are boosted, with pT>200 GeV a large fraction of the time. Since Higgses appear in cascades originating from squarks and/or gluinos, the cross section for events with at least one Higgs can be the same order as squark/gluino production. Given 10 fb-1 of 14 TeV LHC data, with mq-tilde < or approx. 1 TeV, and one of the above superpartner mass hierarchies, our estimate of S/√(B) of the Higgs signal is sufficiently high that the bb mode can become the discovery mode of the lightest Higgs boson of the MSSM.

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
Journal Volume
82
Journal Issue
9
Journal Page Range
p. 095012-095012.16
ISSN
0556-2821
CODEN
PRVDAQ

Optional Information

Notes
(c) 2010 American Institute of Physics