A search for the decay to a pair of new particles of either the 125 GeV Higgs boson (h) or a second charge parity (CP)-even Higgs boson (H) is presented. The data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb−1 of pp collisions at s=8 TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in 2012. The search was done in the context of the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model, in which the new particles are the lightest neutral pseudoscalar Higgs bosons (a). One of the two a bosons is required to decay to two muons while the other is required to decay to two τ leptons. No significant excess is observed above the expected backgrounds in the dimuon invariant mass range from 3.7 to 50 GeV. Upper limits are placed on the production of h→aa relative to the standard model gg→h production, assuming no coupling of the a boson to quarks. The most stringent limit is placed at 3.5% for ma=3.75 GeV. Upper limits are also placed on the production cross section of H→aa from 2.33 to 0.72 pb, for fixed ma=5 GeV with mH ranging from 100 to 500 GeV.Received 8 May 2015DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.92.052002This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.© 2015 CERN, for the ATLAS Collaboration
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