Detection of the neutral MSSM Higgs bosons in the intense-coupling regime at the LHC

We analyse the prospects to detect at the LHC the neutral Higgs particles of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, when the masses of the two CP-even h, H and of the CP-odd A boson are close to one another, and the value of tan beta is large. In this "intense-coupling regime", the Higgs bosons have strongly enhanced couplings to isospin down-type fermions and large total decay widths, so that the gammagamma, WW* and ZZ* decay modes of the three Higgs bosons are strongly suppressed. We advocate the use of the decays into muon pairs, h, H, A --> mu(+)mu(-), to resolve the three Higgs boson peaks: although the branching ratios are small, O(10(-4)), the resolution on muons is good enough to allow for their detection, if the mass splitting is large enough. Using an event generator analysis and a fast detector simulation, we show that the process pp --> b (b) over bar mu(+)mu(-), when at least one of the b-quarks is detected, is viable. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V.