| The phenomenology of the Standard Model Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a well-explored subject. However, to protect the mass of the Higgs boson against large contributions from quantum corrections the Standard Model must be extended. Because the phenomenology of the Standard Model Higgs boson at mh ≲ 140 GeV is heavily dependent on its weak couplings to light fermions, any new physics at the electroweak scale which couples to the Higgs boson can easily dominate Higgs branching ratios, making SM Higgs searches at the LHC futile. It is of paramount importance that such an eventuality be studied. One of the more common scenarios is the extension of the Higgs sector to include an additional gauge singlet (pseudo)scalar. Such a particle exists in a number of models of new physics, including Little Higgs theories and the next-to-minimal supersymmetric extension to the Standard Model (NMSSM). The phenomenology of Higgs boson decays under this scenario is extremely difficult, as it generally leads to multi-jet final states. Nevertheless, I describe a number of different searches for these cascade Higgs decays which show promise as discovery channels at the LHC. |
