Searching for Additional Higgs Bosons via Higgs Cascades

Abstract

The discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider strongly motivates direct searches for additional Higgs bosons. In a type I two Higgs doublet model there is a large region of parameter space at $\tan \beta >5$ that is currently unconstrained experimentally. We show that the process $gg\to H\to AZ\to ZZh$ can probe this region, and can be the discovery mode for an extended Higgs sector at the LHC. We analyze 9 promising decay modes for the $ZZh$ state, and we find that the most sensitive final states are $\ell \ell \ell \ell bb$, $\ell \ell jjbb$, $\ell \ell \nu \nu \gamma \gamma$ and $\ell \ell \ell \ell +$missing energy.

Comments: 24 pages, 12 figures