A novel experimental search channel for very light higgs bosons in the 2HDM type I

Abstract

Abstract We present a reinterpretation study of existing results from the CMS Collaboration, specifically, searches for light Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) Higgs pairs produced in the chain decay $$pp\rightarrow H_\textrm{SM}\rightarrow hh(aa)$$ p p → H SM → h h ( a a ) into a variety of final states, in the context of the CP-conserving 2-Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) Type-I. Through this, we test the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sensitivity to a possible new signature, $$pp\rightarrow H_\textrm{SM}\rightarrow ZA\rightarrow ZZ h$$ p p → H SM → Z A → Z Z h , with $$ZZ\rightarrow jj \mu ^+\mu ^-$$ Z Z → j j μ + μ - and $$h\rightarrow b\bar{b}$$ h → b b ¯ . We perform a systematic scan over the 2HDM Type-I parameter space, by taking into account all available theoretical and experimental constraints, in order to find a region with a potentially visible signal. We investigate the significance of it through a full Monte Carlo simulation down to the parametrised detector level. We show that such a signal is an alternative promising channel to standard four-body searches for light BSM Higgs bosons at the LHC already with an integrated luminosity of $${{\mathcal {L}}} = 300~\textrm{fb}^{-1}$$ L = 300 fb - 1 . For a tenfold increase of the latter, discovery should be possible over most of the allowed parameter space.