The Higgs sector of the phenomenological MSSM in the light of the Higgs boson discovery

A bstract The long awaited discovery of a new light scalar boson at the LHC opens up a new era of studies of the Higgs sector in the Standard Model and in its extensions. In this paper we discuss the consequences of the observation of a light Higgs boson with the mass and rates reported by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations on the parameter space of the phenomenological MSSM, accounting also for the LHC searches for heavier Higgs bosons and supersymmetric particle partners, as well as constraints from B -physics and dark matter. We explore the various regimes of the MSSM Higgs sector, depending on the parameters M A and tan β , and show that only two of them are still allowed by all present experimental constraints: the decoupling regime, in which there is only one light and standard-like Higgs boson while the heavier Higgs states decouple from gauge bosons, and the supersymmetric regime, in which there are light supersymmetric particle partners which might affect the decay properties of the light Higgs boson, in particular its di-photon and invisible decays.