Heavy Higgs Bosons at 14 TeV and 100 TeV

Abstract

Searching for Higgs bosons beyond the Standard Model (BSM) is one of the most important missions for hadron colliders. As a landmark of BSM physics, the MSSM Higgs sector at the LHC is expected to be tested up to the scale of the decoupling limit of O(1) TeV, except for a wedge region centered around $\tan {\hat{I}}^2\sim 3-10$, which has been known to be difficult to probe. In this article, we present a dedicated study testing the decoupled MSSM Higgs sector, at the LHC and a next-generation $pp$-collider, proposing to search in channels with associated Higgs productions, with the neutral and charged Higgs further decaying into $tt$ and $tb$, respectively. In the case of neutral Higgs we are able to probe for the so far uncovered wedge region via $pp\to bbH/A\to bbtt$. Additionally, we cover the the high $\tan {\hat{I}}^2$ range with $pp\to bbH/A\to bb\ddot{I}„\ddot{I}„$. The combination of these searches with channels dedicated to the low $\tan {\hat{I}}^2$ region, such as $pp\to H/A\to tt$ and $pp\to ttH/A\to tttt$ potentially covers the full $\tan {\hat{I}}^2$ range. The search for charged Higgs has a slightly smaller sensitivity for the moderate $\tan {\hat{I}}^2$ region, but additionally probes for the higher and lower $\tan {\hat{I}}^2$ regions with even greater sensitivity, via $pp\to tb{H}^{\pm }\to tbtb$. While the LHC will be able to probe the whole $\tan {\hat{I}}^2$ range for Higgs masses of O(1) TeV by combining these channels, we show that a future 100 TeV $pp$-collider has a potential to push the sensitivity reach up to $\sim \mathcal{O}(10)$ TeV. In order to deal with the novel kinematics of top quarks produced by heavy Higgs decays, the multivariate Boosted Decision Tree (BDT) method is applied in our collider analyses. The BDT-based tagging efficiencies of both hadronic and leptonic top-jets, and their mutual fake rates as well as the faking rates by other jets ($h$, $Z$, $W$, $b$, etc.) are also presented.

published version