A Search for Supersymmetric Higgs Bosons in the Di-Tau Decay Mode in Proton Anti-Proton Collisions at sqrt(s)=1.8 TeV

Abstract

A search for direct production of Higgs bosons in the di-tau decay mode is performed with 86.3 +/- 3.5 pb^-1 of data collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab during the 1994-1995 data taking period of the Tevatron. We search for events where one tau decays to an electron plus neutrinos and the other tau decays hadronically. We perform a counting experiment and set limits on the cross section for supersymmetric Higgs boson production where tan(beta) is large and m_A is small. For a benchmark parameter space point where m_A=100 GeV/c^2 and tan(beta)=50, we limit the production cross section multiplied by the branching ratio to be less than 77.9 pb at the 95% confidence level compared to the theoretically predicted value of 11.0 pb. This is the first search for Higgs bosons decaying to tau pairs at a hadron collider.