Search for an exotic decay of the Higgs boson to a pair of light pseudoscalars in the final state with two muons and two b quarks in pp collisions at 13 TeV

Understand

A search for exotic decays of the Higgs boson to a pair of light pseudoscalar particles a$_1$ is performed under the hypothesis that one of the pseudoscalars decays to a pair of opposite sign muons and the other decays to b$\overline{\mathrm{b}}$.

• Such signatures are predicted in a number of extensions of the standard model (SM), including next-to-minimal supersymmetry and two-Higgs-doublet models with an additional scalar singlet.
• The results are based on a data set of proton-proton collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb$^{-1}$, accumulated with the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC in 2016 at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV.
• No statistically significant excess is observed with respect to the SM backgrounds in the search region for pseudoscalar masses from 20 GeV to half of the Higgs boson mass.