Pair production of Higgs boson in NMSSM at the LHC with the next-to-lightest CP-even Higgs boson being SM-like**Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (11705048)

Abstract

The next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (NMSSM) more naturally accommodates a Higgs boson with a mass of approximately 125 GeV than the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM). In this work, we assume that the next-to-lightest CP-even Higgs boson h2 is the SM-like Higgs boson h, whereas the lightest CP-even Higgs boson h1 is dominantly singlet-like. We discuss the h1h1, h2h2, and h1h2 pair production processes via gluon-gluon fusion at the LHC for an collision energy of 14 TeV, and we consider the cases in which one Higgs boson decays to and the other decays to γγ or τ+τ−. We find that, for mh1 ≲ 62 GeV, the cross section of the gg → h1h1 process is relatively large and maximally reaches 5400 fb, and the production rate of the final state can reach 1500 fb, which make the detection of this final state possible for future searches of an integrated luminosity of 300 and 3000 fb−1. This is mainly due to the contributions from the resonant production process pp → h2 → h1h1 and the relatively large branching ratio of and . The cross sections of the pp → h2h2 and pp → h1h2 production processes maximally reach 28 fb and 133 fb, respectively.