Production of a light top-squark pair in association with a light non-SM Higgs boson within the NMSSM from proton–proton collisions at s = 13 TeV and 33 TeV

Abstract

We study the production of a light top-squark pair in association with the lightest Higgs boson [Formula: see text], as predicted by the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) in proton–proton collisions at center-of-mass energies of 13 TeV and 33 TeV. We scan randomly about 10 million points of the NMSSM parameter space, allowing all possible decays of the lightest top-squark and lightest Higgs boson, with no further assumptions, except for known physical constraints such as perturbative bounds, dark matter relic density consistent with recent Planck experiment measurements, Higgs mass bounds on the next to lightest Higgs boson, [Formula: see text], assuming it is consistent with LHC measurements for the Standard Model Higgs boson, LEP bounds for the chargino mass and [Formula: see text] invisible width, experimental bounds on [Formula: see text] meson rare decays and some LHC experimental bounds on SUSY particle spectra different to the particles involved in our analysis. We find that for low mass top-squark, the dominating decay mode is [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text]. We use three benchmark points with the highest cross-sections, which naturally fall within the compressed spectra of the top-squark, and make a phenomenological analysis to determine the optimal event selection that maximizes the signal significance over backgrounds. We focus on the leptonic decays of both [Formula: see text]’s and the decay of the lightest Higgs boson into [Formula: see text]-quarks [Formula: see text]. Our results show that the high luminosity LHC will have limitations to observe the studied SUSY scenario and only a proton collider with a collision energy above 33 TeV will be able to observe this signal with more than three standard deviations over background, albeit for stop masses below 300 GeV.