Enhanced Higgs pair production from higgsino decay at the HL-LHC

The scenario of multi-sector SUSY breaking predicts pseudo-goldstinos which are not absorbed by the gravitino and their mass can be as low as O(0.1) GeV. Since the interactions of pseudo-goldstinos are not so weak as gravitino, a produced higgsino can decay to a pseudo-goldstino plus a Higgs boson insider the detector at the LHC, and thus the higgsino pair production can lead to the signal of Higgs pair plus missing energy. For the scenario of natural SUSY which requires rather light higgsinos, such events may sizably outnumber the Higgs pair events predicted by the SM and be accessible at the HL-LHC (14 TeV with a luminosity of 3 ab(-1)). In this work we examine the observability of such Higgs pair plus missing energy from the decay of light higgsinos produced at the HL-LHC. Considering three channels of the Higgs-pair decay (bbWW*, bb gamma gamma, bbbb), our detailed Monte Carlo simulations for the signal and backgrounds show that the best channel is bbbb + E-T, whose statistical significance can reach 2 sigma level for a light higgsino allowed by current experiments. This is over the SM Higgs pair result which is about 1.8 sigma. (C) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.