Discovery potential of the NMSSM CP-odd Higgs at the LHC

Abstract

In this paper we examine the LHC discovery potential of the lightest CP-odd Higgs boson, a 1 , of the NMSSM produced in gluon fusion channel gg → a 1 . We evaluate the inclusive signal rates of the a 1 for a variety of decay channels and discuss its possible discovery. It is observed that the overall production and decay rates at inclusive level are quite sizable and should help extracting the a 1 signal over some regions of the NMSSM parameter space.

Review of a Light NMSSM Pseudoscalar Higgs-State Production at the LHC

“…Details of our parameter space scan including theoretical and experimental constraints can be found in Refs. [55][56][57][58]. To study the LHC discovery potential of the a 1 , the inclusive production rates were calculated by multiplying the production cross sections extracted from CalcHEP [106] by the branching ratios computed with the NMSSMTools for all surviving data points, assuming the center of mass energy √ s = 14 TeV.…”

“…We also show that the process gg → h 2 → a 1 a 1 is an alternative option to produce the light pseudoscalar Higgs boson, in which case our random scan reveals that the non-SM-like Higgs boson h 2 mainly decays into a pair of a 1 's with a branching ratio 0.5 as long as it is kinematically allowed. The content is based on our previous work [55][56][57][58]. The layout of the remainder of this article is as follows.…”

“…Figure 3. The correlations between the mixing angle cos θ A and the branching ratios BR(a 1 → γγ) (left) and BR(a 1 → Zγ) (right)[55].…”

“…The production rates σ(gg→ a 1 ) Br(a 1 → t t) (top) σ(gg → a 1 ) BR(a 1 → b b) (middle) and σ(gg → a 1 ) BR(a 1 → τ + τ − ) (bottom)as functions of m a 1 (left) and of the corresponding branching ratios (right)[55].…”