Production and two-photon decay of the MSSM scalar Higgs bosons at the LHC

Abstract

We consider the production and two-photon decay of the CP-even Higgs bosons (h₀ and H₀) of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) at the Large Hadron Collider. We study in detail the dependence of the cross section on various parameters of the MSSM, especially the dependence on the mixing effects in the squark sector due to the Higgs bilinear parameter μ and the soft supersymmetry breaking parameter A. We find that the cross section for the production of these Higgs bosons has a significant dependence on the parameters which determine the chiral mixing in the squark sector. The cross section times the two-photon branching ratio of h₀is of the order of 15-25~fb in much of the parameter space that remains after imposing the present experimental constraints. For the H₀ the two-photon branching ratio is only significant if the H₀ is light, but then the cross section times the branching ratio may exceed 200~fb. The QCD corrections due to quark loop contributions are known to increase the cross section by 50%. We find the dependence of the cross section on the gluon distribution function used to be rather insignificant.