Light Higgs bosons in NMSSM at the LHC

Abstract

The next-to-minimal supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) with an extended Higgs sector offers at least one Higgs boson as the Standard Model (SM)-like Higgs with a mass around 125 GeV. In this work, we revisit the mass spectrum and couplings of non-SM-like Higgs bosons taking into consideration most relevant constraints and identify the relevant parameter space. The discovery potential of these non-SM-like Higgs bosons, apart from their masses, is guided by their couplings with gauge bosons and fermions which are very much parameter space sensitive. We evaluate the rates of productions of these non-SM-like Higgs bosons at the LHC for a variety of decay channels in the allowed region of the parameter space. Although [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] modes appear to be the most promising decay channels, but for a substantial region of parameter space the two-photon decay mode has a remarkably large rate. In this study we emphasize that this diphoton mode can be exploited to find the non-SM-like Higgs bosons of the NMSSM and can also be a potential avenue to distinguish the NMSSM from the MSSM. In addition, we discuss briefly the various detectable signals of these non-SM Higgs bosons at the LHC.