A Supersymmetric Higgs Sector with Chiral D-terms

Abstract

Although supersymmetry remains the best candidate for solving the electroweak hierarchy problem, a supersymmetric Higgs boson near 125 GeV requires heavy scalars, highly-mixed stops, or non-minimal contributions to the Higgs potential. Extensions of the Standard Model (SM) gauge group provide an attractive means of raising the Higgs mass through non-decoupling D-term contributions to the Higgs quartic, but in most cases this correction is correlated with an enhanced coupling to bottom quarks and tau leptons that is disfavored by current fits to LHC Higgs data. In this work we demonstrate that the Higgs mass may be raised by non-decoupling D-terms without such enhanced couplings if the two supersymmetric Higgs doublets are "chiral", i.e., charged under different gauge groups at high energies. In this case there is no direct correlation between the correction to the Higgs mass and its couplings to SM states, and in general the chiral correction to the Higgs potential undoes the MSSM preference for enhanced bottom couplings. This raises the prospects for discovering additional supersymmetric Higgs bosons consistent with the measured mass and couplings of the observed Higgs.