Extracting MSSM masses from heavy Higgs boson decays to four leptons at the CERN LHC

Abstract

It is well known that finding and measuring the masses of particles in the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be possible using invariant mass distributions in exclusive channels containing ${n}_{j}$ jets and ${n}_{l}$ leptons. We perform this analysis for the $({n}_{j},{n}_{l})=(0,4)$ decay of heavy Higgs bosons to neutralinos, $pp\ensuremath{\rightarrow}H/A\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{\stackrel{\texttildelow{}}{\ensuremath{\chi}}}_{i}^{0}{\stackrel{\texttildelow{}}{\ensuremath{\chi}}}_{j}^{0}$ ($i$, $j=2$, 3, 4), which then decay to four leptons and two lightest neutralinos ${\stackrel{\texttildelow{}}{\ensuremath{\chi}}}_{1}^{0}$ via on-shell sleptons. When $i=j$ and the sleptons are degenerate, our Monte Carlo study shows that the LHC will be able to measure the Higgs and relevant neutralino and slepton masses to roughly 30%; however, if one of these is already known within 5%, the other three may be found to equal or better accuracy. This would provide the first accurate measurement of the $H/A$ mass via invariant mass distribution techniques.