Role of h --> eta eta in Intermediate-Mass Higgs Boson Searches at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

The dominance of $h\to \eta \eta$ decay mode for the intermediate mass Higgs boson is highly motivated to solve the little hierarchy problem and to ease the tension with the precision data. However, the discovery modes for $m_h \alt 150$ GeV, $h\to \gamma \gamma$ and $W/Zh\to (\ell \nu /\ell \bar{\ell })(b\bar{b})$, will be substantially affected. In this Letter, we show that $h\to \eta \eta \to 4b$ is complementary and we can use this decay mode to detect the intermediate Higgs boson at the LHC, via $Wh$ and $Zh$ production. Requiring at least one charged lepton and 4 $B$-tags in the final state, we can identify a clean Higgs boson signal for $m_h \alt 150$ GeV with a high significance and with a full Higgs mass reconstruction. We use the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model and the simplest little Higgs model for illustration.

4 pages, 1 figure, revtex. This version matches the published version in Phys. Rev. Lett

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