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Showing papers by "Nausheen R. Shah published in 2012"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors considered the possibility of a SM-like Higgs in the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), with a mass of about 125 GeV and with a production times decay rate into two photons which is similar or somewhat larger than the SM one.
Abstract: We consider the possibility of a Standard Model (SM)-like Higgs in the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), with a mass of about 125 GeV and with a production times decay rate into two photons which is similar or somewhat larger than the SM one. The relatively large value of the SM-like Higgs mass demands stops in the several hundred GeV mass range with somewhat large mixing, or a large hierarchy between the two stop masses in the case that one of the two stops is light. We nd that, in general, if the heaviest stop mass is smaller than a few TeV, the rate of gluon fusion production of Higgs bosons decaying into two photons tends to be somewhat suppressed with respect to the SM one in this region of parameters. However, we show that an enhancement of the photon decay rate may be obtained for light third generation sleptons with large mixing, which can be naturally obtained for large values of tan and sizable values of the Higgsino mass parameter.

299 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that a Higgs boson with mass of about 125GeV was consistent with the values that may be obtained in minimal supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (SM), with both stop masses less than a TeV and large mixing.
Abstract: Recently, an excess of events consistent with a Higgs boson with mass of about 125 GeV was reported by the CMS and ATLAS experiments. This Higgs boson mass is consistent with the values that may be obtained in minimal supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (SM), with both stop masses less than a TeV and large mixing. The apparently enhanced photon production rate associated with this potential Higgs signal may be the result of light staus with large mixing. Large stau mixing and large coupling of the staus to the SM-like Higgs boson may be obtained for large values of tan β and moderate to large values of the Higgsino mass parameter, μ. We study the phenomenological properties of this scenario, including precision electroweak data, the muon anomalous magnetic moment, Dark Matter, and the evolution of the soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters to high energies. We also analyze the possible collider signatures of light third generation sleptons and demonstrate that it is possible to find evidence of their production at the 8 TeV and the 14 TeV LHC. The most promising channel is stau and tau sneutrino associated production, with the sneutrino decaying into a W boson plus a light stau.

178 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that a Higgs boson with mass of about 125 GeV was consistent with the values that may be obtained in minimal supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (SM), with both stop masses less than a TeV and large mixing.
Abstract: Recently, an excess of events consistent with a Higgs boson with mass of about 125 GeV was reported by the CMS and ATLAS experiments. This Higgs boson mass is consistent with the values that may be obtained in minimal supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model (SM), with both stop masses less than a TeV and large mixing. The apparently enhanced photon production rate associated with this potential Higgs signal may be the result of light staus with large mixing. Large stau mixing and large coupling of the staus to the SM-like Higgs boson may be obtained for large values of tan \beta, and moderate to large values of the Higgsino mass parameter, \mu. We study the phenomenological properties of this scenario, including precision electroweak data, the muon anomalous magnetic moment, Dark Matter, and the evolution of the soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters to high energies. We also analyze the possible collider signatures of light third generation sleptons and demonstrate that it is possible to find evidence of their production at the 8 TeV and the 14 TeV LHC. The most promising channel is stau and tau sneutrino associated production, with the sneutrino decaying into a W boson plus a light stau.

176 citations


Posted Content
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors considered the possibility of a SM-like Higgs in the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), with a mass of about 125 GeV and with a production times decay rate into two photons which is similar or somewhat larger than the SM one.
Abstract: We consider the possibility of a Standard Model (SM)-like Higgs in the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), with a mass of about 125 GeV and with a production times decay rate into two photons which is similar or somewhat larger than the SM one. The relatively large value of the SM-like Higgs mass demands stops in the several hundred GeV mass range with somewhat large mixing, or a large hierarchy between the two stop masses in the case that one of the two stops is light. We nd that, in general, if the heaviest stop mass is smaller than a few TeV, the rate of gluon fusion production of Higgs bosons decaying into two photons tends to be somewhat suppressed with respect to the SM one in this region of parameters. However, we show that an enhancement of the photon decay rate may be obtained for light third generation sleptons with large mixing, which can be naturally obtained for large values of tan and sizable values of the Higgsino mass parameter.

104 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the stability of the vacuum and the electroweak phase transition in the NMSSM close to the Peccei-Quinn symmetry limit was analyzed, and it was shown that when the lightest $CP$-even Higgs mass is of the order of a few GeV, the phase transition tends to become first order and strong.
Abstract: We analyze the stability of the vacuum and the electroweak phase transition in the NMSSM close to the Peccei-Quinn symmetry limit. This limit contains light dark matter (DM) particles with a mass significantly smaller than the weak scale and also light $CP$-even and $CP$-odd Higgs bosons. Such light particles lead to a consistent relic density and facilitate a large spin-independent direct DM detection cross section, that may accommodate the recently reported signatures at the DAMA and CoGeNT experiments. Studying the one-loop effective potential at finite temperature, we show that when the lightest $CP$-even Higgs mass is of the order of a few GeV, the electroweak phase transition tends to become first order and strong. The inverse relationship between the direct-detection cross section and the lightest $CP$-even Higgs mass implies that a cross section of the order of ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}41}\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{cm}}^{2}$ is correlated with a strong first-order phase transition.

82 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) with minimal flavor violation (MFV), imposing constraints from flavor physics observables and MSSM Higgs searches, was studied.
Abstract: We study the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) with minimal flavor violation (MFV), imposing constraints from flavor physics observables and MSSM Higgs searches, in light of the recent discovery of a 125 GeV Higgs boson by ATLAS and CMS. We analyze the electroweak vacuum stability conditions to further restrict the MSSM parameter space. In addition, a connection to ultraviolet physics is shown via an implementation of renormalization group running, which determines the TeV-scale spectrum from a small set of minimal supergravity parameters. Finally, we investigate the impact from dark matter direct detection searches. Our work highlights the complementarity of collider, flavor and dark matter probes in exploring the MSSM, and shows that even in a MFV framework, flavor observables constrain the MSSM parameter space well beyond the current reach of direct SUSY particle searches.

43 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors revisited the issue of vacuum instability induced by large mixing in the stau sector, including effects of a radiatively-corrected tau Yukawa coupling.
Abstract: Current Higgs data at the Large Hadron Collider is compatible with a SM signal at the 2$\sigma$ level, but the central value of the signal strength in the diphoton channel is enhanced with respect to the SM expectation. If the enhancement resides in the diphoton partial decay width, the data could be accommodated in the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) with highly mixed light staus. We revisit the issue of vacuum instability induced by large mixing in the stau sector, including effects of a radiatively-corrected tau Yukawa coupling. Further, we emphasize the importance of taking into account the $\tan\beta$ dependence in the stability bound. While the metastability of the Universe constrains the possible enhancement in the Higgs to diphoton decay width in the light stau scenario, an increase of the order of 50% can be achieved in the region of large $\tan\beta$. Larger enhancements may be obtained, but would require values of $\tan\beta$ associated with non-perturbative values of the tau Yukawa coupling at scales below the GUT scale, thereby implying the presence of new physics beyond the MSSM.

23 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a general approach based on the pMSSM parametrization of the soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters is proposed to determine the probability distributions for the Renormalization Group Invariants.
Abstract: The LHC has started to constrain supersymmetry-breaking parameters by setting bounds on possible colored particles at the weak scale. Moreover, constraints from Higgs physics, flavor physics, the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, as well as from searches at LEP and the Tevatron have set additional bounds on these parameters. Renormalization Group Invariants (RGIs) provide a very useful way of representing the allowed parameter space by making direct connection with the values of these parameters at the messenger scale. Using a general approach, based on the pMSSM parametrization of the soft supersymmetry-breaking parameters, we analyze the current experimental constraints to determine the probability distributions for the RGIs. As examples of their application, we use these distributions to analyze the question of Gaugino Mass Unification and to probabilistically determine the parameters of General and Minimal Gauge Mediation with arbitrary Higgs mass parameters at the Messenger Scale.

17 citations