Discovery prospects for NMSSM Higgs bosons at the high-energy Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

We investigate the discovery prospects for Higgs bosons in the next-to-mininmal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (NMSSM) during the 13 TeV run of the LHC. While one of the neutral Higgs bosons is demanded to have a mass around 125 GeV and Standard Model-like properties, there can be substantially lighter, nearby or heavier Higgs bosons that have not been excluded yet by LEP, Tevatron or the 8 TeV run of the LHC. The challenge consists in discovering the whole NMSSM Higgs mass spectrum. We present the rates for production and subsequent decay of the neutral NMSSM Higgs bosons in the most promising final states and discuss their possible discovery. The prospects for pinning down the Higgs sector of the natural NMSSM will be analyzed taking into account alternative search channels. We give a series of benchmark scenarios compatible with the experimental constraints, that feature Higgs-to-Higgs decays and entail (exotic) signatures with multifermion and/or multiphoton final states. These decay chains furthermore give access to the trilinear Higgs self-couplings. We briefly discuss the possibility of exploiting coupling sum rules in case not all the NMSSM Higgs bosons are discovered.