Very light CP-odd Higgs bosons of the NMSSM at the LHC in 4b-quark final states

We study the detectability of the lightest CP-odd Higgs boson of the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (NMSSM), a(1), at the LHC through its production in association with a bottom-quark pair followed by the a(1) -> b (b) over bar decay. It is shown that, for large tan beta and very high luminosity of the LHC, there exist regions of the NMSSM parameter space that can be exploited to detect the a(1) through this channel. This signature is a characteristic feature of the NMSSM in comparison to the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), as a(1) masses involved are well below those allowed in the MSSM for the corresponding CP-odd Higgs state.