Search for Neutral Higgs Bosons of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model in e e Intera.pdfVIP

EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH CERN-EP/2000-145 November 24, 2000 Search for Neutral Higgs Bosons of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model in e+e− Interactions at √s = 192 − 202 GeV The L3 Collaboration Abstract A search for the lightest neutral CP-even and the neutral CP-odd Higgs bosons of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model is performed using 233.2 pb−1 of integrated luminosity collected with the L3 detector at LEP at centre-of-mass energies 192 − 202 GeV. No signal is observed and lower mass limits are given as a function of tanβ for two scalar top mixing hypotheses. For tanβ greater than 0.8, they are mh 83.4 GeV and mA 83.8 GeV at 95% confidence level. Submitted to Phys. Lett. B 1 Introduction The Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) [1] requires two Higgs doublets. This gives rise to five Higgs bosons: a charged scalar pair, two neutral CP-even, the lightest of which is called h, and a neutral CP-odd, A. The two most important production mechanisms in e+e− collisions are: e+e− → Z∗ → hZ (1) e+e− → Z∗ → hA. (2) The cross section of the process (1) is smaller than that for the similar production of the Higgs boson in the Standard Model. This process is dominant at low values of tanβ (tanβ 5), where tanβ is the ratio of the two Higgs vacuum expectation values. The pair-production of Higgs bosons (2) takes over at high