Detecting Higgs bosons with muons at hadron colliders

We investigate the prospects for the discovery of neutral Higgs bosons with a pair of muons by direct searches at the CERN large hadron collider (LHC) as well as by indirect searches in the rare decay Bs→μ+μ− at the Fermilab Tevatron and the LHC. Promising results are found for the minimal supersymmetric standard model, the minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) model, and supergravity models with non-universal Higgs masses (NUHM SUGRA). For tanβ≃50, we find that (i) the contours for a branching fraction of B(Bs→μ+μ−)=1×10−8 in the parameter space are very close to the 5σ contours for pp→bϕ0→bμ+μ−+X, ϕ0=h0, H0, A0 at the LHC with an integrated luminosity (L) of 30 fb−1, (ii) the regions covered by B(Bs→μ+μ−)⩾5×10−9 and the discovery region for bϕ0→bμ+μ− with 300 fb−1 are complementary in the mSUGRA parameter space, (iii) in NUHM SUGRA models, a discovery of B(Bs→μ+μ−)≃5×10−9 at the LHC will cover regions of the parameter space beyond the direct search for bϕ0→bμ+μ− with L=300fb−1.