Search for a low-mass Higgs boson ($A^0$) at BABAR

Abstract

The BABAR Collaboration has performed three searches for a light Higgs boson, $A^0$, in radiative Upsilon (${\rm Y}$) decays: ${\rm Y}(3S)\to \gamma A^0$, $A^0\to {\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-}$; ${\rm Y}(nS)\to \gamma A^0$, $A^0\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ ($n=2,3$); and ${\rm Y}(3S)\to \gamma A^0$, $A^0\to$ invisible. Such a Higgs boson ($A^0$) appears in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, where a light CP-odd Higgs boson couples strongly to $b$-quarks. The searches are based on data samples that consist of $122\times 10^6$ ${\rm Y}(3S)$ and $99\times 10^6$ ${\rm Y}(2S)$ decays, collected by the BABAR detector at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The searches reveal no evidence for an $A^0$, and product of branching fractions upper limits, at 90% C.L., of $(1.5-16)\times 10^{-5}$, $(0.44-44)\times 10^{-6}$, and $(0.7-31)\times 10^{-6}$ were obtained for these searches, respectively. Also, we set the upper limits $\mathcal{B}({\eta }_b\to {\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-})<8$ and $\mathcal{B}({\eta }_b\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-})<0.9$.

To appear in the proceedings of the 2009 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, July 16-22, 2009, Krakow, Poland

References in corpus (1)

• Search for a low-mass Higgs boson in Y(3S)-->gamma A^0, A^0-->tau^+tau^- at BABAR