Tau-jet signatures of vectorlike quark decays to heavy charged and neutral Higgs bosons

Abstract

We study 4b + 2τ and 4b + 1τ signatures of heavy neutral and charged Higgs bosons originating from cascade decays of pair-produced new quarks. Decays of vectorlike quarks through heavy Higgses can easily dominate in the two Higgs doublet model of type-II, and the studied signatures are common to many possible decay chains. We design search strategies for these final states and discuss the mass ranges of heavy Higgs bosons and new quarks that can be explored at the Large Hadron Collider as functions of branching ratios in a model independent way. We further combine the results with a similar study focusing on decays which lead to a 6b final state and interpret the sensitivity to charged and neutral Higgs bosons and vectorlike quarks in the type-II two Higgs doublet model. We find that the LHC reach for their masses extends to well above 2 TeV in the case of an SU(2) doublet quark and to at least 1.8 TeV for a bottom-like SU(2) singlet quark in the whole range of tan β between 1 and 50.

Phenomenological aspects of composite Higgs scenarios: exotic scalars and vector-like quarks

“…Moreover, the new decay channels can be tested against experimental data to obtain combined limits on the masses of VLQs and the new states they can decay into. Experimental searches targeting exotic decays of VLQs are not available yet, however phenomenological analyses providing recasts of different searches have already appeared [44,[104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113].…”

Heavy vector-like quarks decaying to exotic scalars: a case study with triplets

“…1. the VLQs typically also interact with light BSM particles present in partial compositeness and other motivated new physics models [9,[55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71];…”

Report of the Topical Group on Physics Beyond the Standard Model at Energy Frontier for Snowmass 2021

“…• 2HDM: Adding an extra Higgs doublet to a VLF model can change both the production and decay modes. It is possible for VLQs to preferentially decay into the additional Higgs bosons and SM fermions [320][321][322]:…”