Discovering Nonstandard Higgs bosons in the H -> ZA Channel Decay to Multileptons

Understand

In this article we consider the possibility of observing nonstandard Higgs bosons in the H -> Z A -> Z tau+ tau- channel.

• We present three benchmark scenarios in the NMSSM where H -> ZA is the dominant decay mode for one of the nonstandard Higgs bosons while the lightest CP-even Higgs is Standard Model like.
• Using the latest CMS multilepton analysis based on 7 TeV LHC data, we put limits on the signal cross-section, which constrain leptophilic scenarios.
• Projecting to future LHC analyses with improvements in background modeling, we show that with O(30) fb^{-1} of data, such a multilepton analysis is very close to constraining our NMSSM benchmarks.