Cascade decays of heavy Higgs bosons through vectorlike quarks in two Higgs doublet models

Abstract

We study cascade decays of heavy neutral Higgs bosons through vectorlike quarks. We focus on scenarios where decay modes into pairs of vectorlike quarks are not kinematically open which extends the sensitivity of the LHC to larger masses. Assuming only mixing with the third family of standard model quarks the new decay modes of heavy Higgs bosons are: H → t4t → Wbt, Ztt, htt and H → b4b → Wtb, Zbb, hbb, where t4 (b4) is the new up-type (down-type) quark mass eigenstate. In the numerical analysis we assume the CP even Higgs boson in the two Higgs doublet model type-II but the signatures are relevant for many other scenarios. We identify the region of the parameter space where these decay modes are significant or can even dominate, and thus they provide the best opportunities for the simultaneous discovery of a new Higgs boson and vectorlike quarks. We further explore the reach of the High Luminosity LHC for two representative decay modes, t4→ Zt → ℓℓt and b4→ Zb → ℓℓb, and found that cross sections at a 0.1 fb level can be probed with simple cut based analyses. We also find that the rates for Higgs cascade decays can be much larger than the rates for a single production of vectorlike quarks. Furthermore, the reach for vectorlike quarks in Higgs cascade decays and pair production extends to comparable masses.