Observability of the lightest MSSM Higgs boson with explicit CP violation via gluon fusion at the LHC

We investigate the observability of the lightest Higgs boson in the gluon-fusion channel at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the minimal supersymmetric Standard Model with explicit CP-violating mixing among three neutral Higgs bosons. The lightest Higgs boson with its mass less than 130 GeV can be detected at the LHC via its gluon-fusion production followed by the decay into two photons. The explicit CP violation can suppress both the production cross section and the two-photon decay branching fraction so significantly that the signal cross section may be more than ten times smaller than the SM signal. This reduction factor can be as small as 1/40 if the lightest Higgs boson mass is 115 GeV and its production cross section at LEP2 is more than 90% that of the SM case. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.