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 $gg \to H \to A Z \to ZZh$ 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.