Four Taus at the Tevatron

46 citations (43 excluding self-citations).

The Problem

In models with extended Higgs sectors, the Higgs boson can decay to a pair of light pseudoscalars, each of which subsequently decays to tau leptons, yielding a four-tau final state. This cascade completely evades the standard Higgs search channels (bb, WW, γγ) that LEP and the Tevatron relied on. By 2006, it was an open question whether such a Higgs could be found at all with existing facilities, or whether it would remain hidden until the LHC.

The Key Idea

We showed that the four-tau cascade produces multi-lepton signatures (from leptonic tau decays) with sufficient rate to generate observable excesses at the Tevatron with 6 fb^-1 of data for a Higgs mass around 110 GeV. The signal appears across several channels involving combinations of electrons, muons, and hadronic taus. While no single channel provides overwhelming significance, the pattern of excesses across multiple lepton channels could collectively indicate a cascade-decaying Higgs. The follow-up paper, “Discovering the Higgs with Low Mass Muon Pairs,” later identified a cleaner discovery channel by exploiting the subdominant muon decay mode of the pseudoscalar.

Recollections

[To be added.]

• arXiv:hep-ph/0605162
• INSPIRE