Prospects for Heavy Neutral SUSY HIGGS Scalars in the hMSSM and Natural SUSY at LHC Upgrades.

We examine production and decay of heavy neutral SUSY Higgs bosons p p → H , A → τ τ ¯ within the hMSSM and compare against a perhaps more plausible natural supersymmetry scenario dubbed m h 125 (nat) which allows for a natural explanation for m w e a k ≃ m W , Z , h ∼ 100 GeV while maintaining m h ≃ 125 GeV. We evaluate signal against various Standard Model backgrounds from γ , Z → τ τ ¯ , t t ¯ and vector boson pair production V V . We combine the transverse mass method for back-to-back (BtB) taus along with the ditau mass peak m τ τ method for acollinear taus as our signal channels. This technique ultimately gives a boost to the signal significance over the standard technique of using just the BtB signal channel. We evaluate both the 95% CL exclusion and 5 σ discovery reach in the m A vs. tan β plane for present LHC with 139 fb−1, Run 3 with 300 fb−1 and high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) with 3000 fb−1 of integrated luminosity. For tan β = 10 , the exclusion limits range up to m A ∼ 1 , 1.1 and 1.4 TeV, respectively. These may be compared to the range of m A values gleaned from a statistical analysis of the string landscape wherein m A can range up to ∼ 8 TeV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]