No Arabic abstract
We perform a parameter scan of the phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (pMSSM) with eight parameters taking into account the experimental Higgs boson results from Run I of the LHC and further low-energy observables. We investigate various MSSM interpretations of the Higgs signal at 125 GeV. First, we consider the case where the light CP-even Higgs boson of the MSSM is identified with the discovered Higgs boson. In this case it can impersonate the SM Higgs-like signal either in the decoupling limit, or in the limit of alignment without decoupling. In the latter case, the other states in the Higgs sector can also be light, offering good prospects for upcoming LHC searches and for searches at future colliders. Second, we demonstrate that the heavy CP-even Higgs boson is still a viable candidate to explain the Higgs signal - albeit only in a highly constrained parameter region, that will be probed by LHC searches for the CP-odd Higgs boson and the charged Higgs boson in the near future. As a guidance for such searches we provide new benchmark scenarios that can be employed to maximize the sensitivity of the experimental analysis to this interpretation.
We explore the parameter choices in the five-dimensional Randall-Sundrum model with the inclusion of Higgs-radion mixing that can describe current LHC hints for one or more Higgs boson signals.
Current Higgs data at the Large Hadron Collider is compatible with a SM signal at the 2$sigma$ level, but the central value of the signal strength in the diphoton channel is enhanced with respect to the SM expectation. If the enhancement resides in the diphoton partial decay width, the data could be accommodated in the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with highly mixed light staus. We revisit the issue of vacuum instability induced by large mixing in the stau sector, including effects of a radiatively-corrected tau Yukawa coupling. Further, we emphasize the importance of taking into account the $tanbeta$ dependence in the stability bound. While the metastability of the Universe constrains the possible enhancement in the Higgs to diphoton decay width in the light stau scenario, an increase of the order of 50% can be achieved in the region of large $tanbeta$. Larger enhancements may be obtained, but would require values of $tanbeta$ associated with non-perturbative values of the tau Yukawa coupling at scales below the GUT scale, thereby implying the presence of new physics beyond the MSSM.
Precision measurements of the Higgs boson properties at the LHC provide relevant constraints on possible weak-scale extensions of the Standard Model (SM). In the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) these constraints seem to suggest that all the additional, non-SM-like Higgs bosons should be heavy, with masses larger than about 400 GeV. This article shows that such results do not hold when the theory approaches the conditions for alignment independent of decoupling, where the lightest CP-even Higgs boson has SM-like tree-level couplings to fermions and gauge bosons, independently of the non-standard Higgs boson masses. The combination of current bounds from direct Higgs boson searches at the LHC, along with the alignment conditions, have a significant impact on the allowed MSSM parameter space yielding light additional Higgs bosons. In particular, after ensuring the correct mass for the lightest CP-even Higgs boson, we find that precision measurements and direct searches are complementary, and may soon be able to probe the region of non-SM-like Higgs boson with masses below the top quark pair mass threshold of 350 GeV and low to moderate values of $tanbeta$.
The parameter space of the phenomenological MSSM (pMSSM) is explored by means of Markov Chain Monte Charlo (MCMC) methods, taking into account the latest LHC results on the Higgs signal at 125 GeV in addition to relevant low-energy observables and LEP constraints. We use a Bayesian approach to derive posterior densities for the parameters and observables of interests. We find in particular that the Higgs measurements have a significant impact on the parameters mu and tan beta due to radiative corrections to the bottom Yukawa coupling. We show moreover the impact of the most recent dark matter measurements on the probability distributions, and we discuss prospects for the next run of the LHC at 13-14 TeV.
State-of-the-art predictions for the mass of the lightest MSSM Higgs boson usually involve the resummation of higher-order logarithmic contributions obtained within an effective-field-theory (EFT) approach, often combined with a fixed-order calculation into a hybrid result. For the phenomenologically interesting case of a significant hierarchy between the gluino mass and the masses of the scalar top quarks the predictions suffer from large theoretical uncertainties related to non-decoupling power-enhanced gluino contributions in the EFT results employing the $overline{text{DR}}$ renormalisation scheme. We demonstrate that the theoretical predictions in the heavy gluino region are vastly improved by the introduction of a suitable renormalisation scheme for the EFT calculation. It is shown that within this scheme a recently proposed resummation of large gluino contributions is absorbed into the model parameters, resulting in reliable and numerically stable predictions in the heavy-gluino gluino region. We also discuss the integration of the results into the public code FeynHiggs.