A novel experimental search channel for very light higgs bosons in the 2HDM type I

We present a reinterpretation study of existing results from the CMS Collaboration, specifically, searches for light Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) Higgs pairs produced in the chain decay pp→ HSM→ hh(aa) p p → H SM → h h ( a a ) into a variety of final states, in the context of the CP-conserving 2-Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) Type-I. Through this, we test the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sensitivity to a possible new signature, pp→ HSM→ ZA→ ZZ h p p → H SM → Z A → Z Z h , with ZZ→ jj μ ⁺μ ⁻ Z Z → j j μ + μ - and h→ bb̄ h → b b ¯ . We perform a systematic scan over the 2HDM Type-I parameter space, by taking into account all available theoretical and experimental constraints, in order to find a region with a potentially visible signal. We investigate the significance of it through a full Monte Carlo simulation down to the parametrised detector level. We show that such a signal is an alternative promising channel to standard four-body searches for light BSM Higgs bosons at the LHC already with an integrated luminosity of L = 300~fb⁻¹ L = 300 fb - 1 . For a tenfold increase of the latter, discovery should be possible over most of the allowed parameter space.