Abstract

We demonstrate that in supersymmetry (SUSY) with relatively light top superpartners, h -> bb can be a very promising channel to discover the SM-like Higgs resonance at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), although in general contexts it is thought to be challenging because of its huge QCD background. In this scenario, the SM-like Higgs boson is mainly produced via cascade decays initiated by pair-produced stop or sbottom squarks. The good sensitivity to h -> bb owes a great deal to the application of multiple (>= 4) b-jet tagging in removing the QCD background, and color-flow variables for reconstructing the Higgs resonance. We show in two benchmark points that a SM-like Higgs resonance can be discovered at the 14 TeV LHC (with a signal-to-background ratio as high as 0.35), with ~< 40/fb of data. Potentially, this strategy can be also applied to non-SUSY theories with cascade decays of top partners for the SM-like Higgs search, such as little Higgs, composite Higgs, and Randall-Sundrum models.

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