A Search for the Neutral Higgs Bosons of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

A search for the neutral Higgs bosons of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), produced in proton-proton collisions recorded by the ATLAS detector, is pre- sented. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb<super>-</super> , with a center of mass energy of 8 TeV. The search focuses on final states where the Higgs bosons decay into a &tau<super>+</super> &tau<super>-</super> pair, with one &tau lepton decaying leptonically and the other hadronically. Two analyses are performed which separately target low-mass and high-mass Higgs bosons, with the former divided into two sub-channels based on the presence or absence of a b-jet in final state. No evidence of new Higgs bosons is found, and upper limits are set on the cross-section times branching ratio of such Higgs bosons, and on the MSSM parameters m_A and tan&beta.