Discovery potential of the NMSSM CP-odd Higgs at the LHC

Abstract

In this paper we examine the LHC discovery potential of the lightest CP-odd Higgs boson, a1, of the NMSSM produced in gluon fusion channel gg->a1. We evaluate the inclusive signal rates of the a1 for a variety of decay channels and discuss its possible discovery. It is observed that the overall production and decay rates at inclusive level are quite sizable and should help extracting the a1 signal over some regions of the NMSSM parameter space.