A search for a heavy Higgs boson H decaying into the observed Higgs boson h with a mass of 125 GeV and another Higgs boson h$_{S}$ is presented. The h and h$_{S}$ bosons are required to decay into a pair of tau leptons and a pair of b quarks, respectively. The search uses a sample of proton-proton collisions collected with the CMS detector at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 137 fb$^{−1}$. Mass ranges of 240–3000 GeV for m$_{H}$ and 60–2800 GeV for $ {m}_{{\mathrm{h}}_{\mathrm{S}}} $ are explored in the search. No signal has been observed. Model independent 95% confidence level upper limits on the product of the production cross section and the branching fractions of the signal process are set with a sensitivity ranging from 125 fb (for m$_{H}$ = 240 GeV) to 2.7 fb (for m$_{H}$ = 1000 GeV). These limits are compared to maximally allowed products of the production cross section and the branching fractions of the signal process in the next-to-minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model.[graphic not available: see fulltext]
Bethani, A., Bruno, G., Bury, F., Caputo, C., David, P., Delaere, C., Donertas, I. S., Giammanco, A., Jaffel, K., Jain, S., Jain, S., Lemaitre, V., Mondal, K., Prisciandaro, J., Taliercio, A., Teklishyn, M., Tran, T. T., Vischia, P., Wertz, S., & et al. (2021). Search for a heavy Higgs boson decaying into two lighter Higgs bosons in the $\tau\tau$bb final state at 13 TeV. Journal of High Energy Physics, 11. https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2021)057 (Original work published 2021)