Discovering extra Higgs boson via pair production of the SM-like Higgs bosons

Abstract

In the standard model (SM), pair production rate of Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is quite low. One usually think that it is extremely important for the measurement of triple Higgs coupling at the high luminosity LHC. In this paper, we propose to search for the extra Higgs boson (denoted as $S$) utilizing pair production of the SM-like Higgs boson ($H$) which was discovered in July, 2012.The pair production of $H$ can be huge due to the resonant production of heavy scalar $S$, namely $PP \rightarrow S \rightarrow HH$. The couplings of $H$ with weak gauge boson are similar to ones in the SM and it implies that the couplings between $S$ and gauge bosons are likely suppressed. Provided that $S$ is heavy enough, the decay into weak gauge bosons may not be the dominant modes. Instead $S$ can decay into a pair of $H$ and offer the promising channel to discover it. In this paper, we studied the 5 promising decay modes of $H$, i.e. $b\bar{b}$, $WW^*$, $ZZ^*$, $γγ$ and $τ^+τ^-$, and simulated the signals and backgrounds for the 15 combination modes for $HH$ at the LHC with $\sqrt{s}= 14$ TeV and integrated luminosity $\mathcal{L}=1000fb^{-1}$. We found that with the help of suitable selection rules, very good signal to background ratio $S/B$ can be archived in many decay channels, for example $b\bar b+ (WW^*, ZZ^*, γγ, τ^+τ^-)$, $WW^*+(WW^*, ZZ^*, γγ, τ^+τ^-)$ and $τ^+τ^- +(γγ, τ^+τ^-)$. For the detailed results please refer to Table \ref{tab:discovery} in the text. On the contrary, $b\bar b b\bar b$ mode is less important due to the huge QCD background. However if one has excellent control on light jet mis-tagging, the $b\bar b b\bar b$ mode can be promising to discover the extra Higgs boson due to its the largest branching ratio compared to other modes.