Associated production of nonstandard Higgs bosons at the LHC

Abstract

We discuss the feasibility of seeing a Higgs boson that decays to four partons through a pair of (pseudo)scalars at the LHC. We restrict our search to Higgs bosons produced in association with a $W/Z$ boson at high transverse momentum. We argue that subjet analysis techniques are a good discriminant between such events and $W/Z+\mathrm{\text{jets}}$ and $t\overline{t}$ production. For light scalar masses (below 30 GeV), we find evidence that a flavor-independent search for such a nonstandard Higgs boson is plausible with $100\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{fb}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ of data, while a Higgs decaying to heavier scalars is only likely to be visible in models where scalar decays to $b$ quarks dominate.