Prospects for Higgs Searches with the Tri-bottom Channel in Unified SUSY Models

Abstract

We investigate the prospects for the discovery of a neutral Higgs boson produced in association with a $b$ quark, followed by the Higgs decay into a pair of bottom quarks, $pp \to b\phi^0 \to b b\bar{b} +X$, at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) within the framework of unified supersymmetric models. The Higgs boson $\phi^0$ can be a heavy scalar $H^0$ or a pseudoscalar $A^0$. Furthermore, this direct discovery channel is compared with the indirect Higgs searches in the rare decay $B_s \to \mu^+\mu^-$ at hadron colliders. Promising results are found for the minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) model, the anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) model, and the gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking (GMSB) model. We find that the indirect search for $B(B_s \to \mu^+\mu^-) \ge 5\times 10^{-9}$ is complementary to the direct search for $b\phi^0 \to bb\bar{b}$ with $\sqrt{s} = 14$ TeV and an integrated luminosity ($L$) of 300 fb$^{-1}$. In the AMSB and GMSB models, $b\phi^0 \to bb\bar{b}$ with $L = 300$ fb$^{-1}$ covers a larger area in the parameter space than $B(B_s \to \mu^+\mu^-) \ge 5\times 10^{-9}$. In addition, we present constraints from $b \to s\gamma$ and muon anomalous dipole moment ($\Delta a_\mu$) on the parameter space.