No Arabic abstract
We investigate possible scenarios of light-squark production at the LHC as a new mechanism to produce Higgs bosons in association with jets. The study is motivated by the SUSY search for H+jets events, performed by the CMS collaboration on 8 and 13 TeV data using the razor variables. Two simplified models are proposed to interpret the observations in this search. The constraint from Run I and the implications for Run II and beyond are discussed.
We study the Higgs boson $(h)$ decay to two light jets at the 14 TeV High-Luminosity-LHC (HL-LHC), where a light jet ($j$) represents any non-flavor tagged jet from the observational point of view. The decay mode $hto gg$ is chosen as the benchmark since it is the dominant channel in the Standard Model (SM), but the bound obtained is also applicable to the light quarks $(j=u,d,s)$. We estimate the achievable bounds on the decay branching fractions through the associated production $Vh (V=W^pm,Z)$. Events of the Higgs boson decaying into heavy (tagged) or light (un-tagged) jets are correlatively analyzed. We find that with 3000 fb$^{-1}$ data at the HL-LHC, we should expect approximately $1sigma$ statistical significance on the SM $Vh(gg)$ signal in this channel. This corresponds to a reachable upper bound ${rm BR}(hto jj) leq 4~ {rm BR}^{SM}(hto gg)$ at $95%$ confidence level. A consistency fit also leads to an upper bound ${rm BR}(hto cc) < 15~ {rm BR}^{SM}(hto cc)$ at $95%$ confidence level. The estimated bound may be further strengthened by adopting multiple variable analyses, or adding other production channels.
We present predictions of the total cross sections for pair production of squarks and gluinos at the LHC, including the stop-antistop production process. Our calculation supplements full fixed-order NLO predictions with resummation of threshold logarithms and Coulomb singularities at next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) accuracy, including bound-state effects. The numerical effect of higher-order Coulomb terms can be as big or larger than that of soft-gluon corrections. For a selection of benchmark points accessible with data from the 2010-2012 LHC runs, resummation leads to an enhancement of the total inclusive squark and gluino production cross section in the 15-30 % range. For individual production processes of gluinos, the corrections can be much larger. The theoretical uncertainty in the prediction of the hard-scattering cross sections is typically reduced to the 10 % level.
We present predictions for the total cross sections for pair production of squarks and gluinos at the LHC including a combined NNLL resummation of soft and Coulomb gluon effects. We derive all terms in the NNLO cross section that are enhanced near the production threshold, which include contributions from spin-dependent potentials and so-called annihilation corrections. The NNLL corrections at $sqrt{s}=13$ TeV range from up to $20%$ for squark-squark production to $90%$ for gluino pair production relative to the NLO results and reduce the theoretical uncertainties of the perturbative calculation to the $10%$ level. Grid files with our numerical results are publicly available.
If the fundamental Planck scale is near a TeV, then TeV scale black holes should be produced in proton-proton collisions at the LHC where sqrt{s} = 14 TeV. As the temperature of the black holes can be ~ 1 TeV we also expect production of Higgs bosons from them via Hawking radiation. This is a different production mode for the Higgs boson, which would normally be produced via direct pQCD parton fusion processes. In this paper we compare total cross sections and transverse momentum distributions dsigma/dp_T for Higgs production from black holes at the LHC with those from direct parton fusion processes at next-to-next-to-leading order and next-to-leading order respectively. We find that the Higgs production from black holes can be larger or smaller than the direct pQCD production depending upon the Planck mass and black hole mass. We also find that dsigma/dp_T of Higgs production from black holes increases as a function of p_T which is in sharp contrast with the pQCD predictions where dsigma/dp_T decreases so we suggest that the measurement of an increase in dsigma/dp_T as p_T increases for Higgs (or any other heavy particle) production can be a useful signature for black holes at the LHC.
Quark flavour conserving (QFC) fermionic squark decays, such as ~t_{1,2} -> t neutralino_i, are usually assumed in squark search analyses. Here we study quark flavour violating (QFV) bosonic squark decays, such as ~u_2 -> ~u_1 h^0/Z^0, where the mass eigenstates ~u_{1,2} are mixtures of scharm and stop quarks. We show that the branching ratios of such QFV decays can be very large due to sizable ~c_R - ~t_{R/L} and ~t_R - ~t_L mixing effects despite the very strong constraints on the QFV parameters from B meson data. This can result in remarkable QFV signatures with significant rates at LHC (14 TeV), such as pp -> gluino gluino X -> t c bar{c} bar{c} h^0/Z^0 missing-E_T X and pp -> gluino gluino X -> t t bar{c} bar{c} h^0/Z^0 missing-E_T X. The QFV bosonic squark decays can play an important role in the squark and gluino searches at LHC (14 TeV).