Discovery Potential of A/H->ττ->lh in ATLAS

This note describes a study of the discovery potential for the supersymmetric Higgs bosons $H/A$ in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV in final states with $\tau$-lepton pairs with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The Higgs bosons are produced in association with $b$-quarks or from gluon-fusion processes and decay into a di-$\tau$ final state. The final state where one $\tau$ lepton decays leptonically and the other hadronically is studied. Higgs boson masses between 150 and 800 GeV are analysed. All results are obtained using the ATLFAST-II simulation of the ATLAS detector except for the determination of the trigger efficiencies. For the latter, selected signal samples are processed with full simulation. Procedures to estimate the contribution of all relevant backgrounds from control regions in data have been developed. The discovery potential in the $m_A$ vs. $\tan\beta$ plane is assessed for the $m_h^\mathrm{max}$ MSSM benchmark scenario and compared to that obtained previously in the fully-leptonic analysis. No pile-up or cavern background has been considered in this analysis. The analysis is based on an integrated luminosity of $30$ fb$^-1$.