Collider signatures of a light NMSSM pseudoscalar in neutralino decays in the light of LHC results

Abstract

We investigate signatures induced by a very light pseudoscalar Higgs in neutralino decays in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) and determine their observability at the LHC. We concentrate on scenarios which feature two light scalar Higgs bosons (one of them is SM-like with a mass of 125 GeV and a singlet-like lighter one) with a very light (singlet-like) pseudoscalar Higgs in the mass range 2mτ< ma01ma10 < 2mb. We consider neutralino-chargino pair production and the subsequent decay χ˜02,3→ χ˜01a01χ~2,30→ χ~10a10 , which leads to topologies involving multi-leptons and missing transverse energy. We determine a set of selection cuts that can effectively isolate the signal from backgrounds of the Standard Model or the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. We also exemplify the procedure with a set of benchmark points, for which we compute the expected number of events and signal strength for LHC with 8 TeV center of mass energy. We show that this signal can already be probed for some points in the NMSSM parameter space.