Search techniques for charged and neutral intermediate-mass Higgs bosons

Abstract

If fundamental scalar bosons exist, a natural implication of theories based on supersymmetry or superstrings, Higgs boson masses are likely to be of order mZ within roughly a factor of two. We term this the intermediate mass range. We study how such Higgs bosons could be detected at e+e- and, particularly, at hadron colliders. At a hadron collider it appears to be necessary to use rare decay modes of the Higgs boson, and we examine H0-->[gamma][gamma], [tau]+[tau]-, Z[gamma], Zl+l-, [Theta][gamma],and b . Since charged scalars also occur in all theories beyond the minimal Standard Model, we examine ways to find the H+/-, concentrating on H+/--->[tau]+/-[nu], W+/-H0, W+/-H0[gamma], W+/- [gamma], and W+/-Z. Because obtaining data about the spectrum of Higgs bosons is so essential, our approach is to ask what facilities would be sufficient to cover the entire intermediate mass range.