Signatures of Supersymmetry and Yukawa Unification in Higgs Decays

Abstract

We show that the branching ratio R_{b/tau}=BR(h^0->bb)/BR(h^0->tau tau) of the Higgs boson h^0 may usefully differentiate between the Higgs sectors of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) and non-supersymmetric models such as the Standard Model or its two Higgs doublet extensions. Although at tree level R_{b/tau} is the same in all these models, only in the MSSM can it receive a large radiative correction, for moderate to large values of the parameter tan(beta). Such large corrections are motivated in supersymmetric unified schemes wherein the Yukawa couplings of the b-quark and the tau-lepton are equal at the unification scale; otherwise the b-quark mass prediction is too large by 15-30% for most of parameter space. Thus accurate measurements of the Higgs branching ratios can probe physics at the unification scale. The branching ratio of h^0 into charm quarks, as well as of the other Higgs bosons (H^0,A^0) into bb, tau tau, and cc can provide additional information about the supersymmetric nature of the Higgs sector.