Search for electroweak production of higgsinos in channels with two Higgs bosons decaying to b quarks in pp collisions at 8 TeV

A search is presented for the electroweak pair production of higgsinos, both of which decay to a Higgs boson and an almost massless, lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Each Higgs boson is reconstructed in its decay to a bottom quark-antiquark pair. The LSPs are presumed to be undetected, leading to missing transverse energy. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 19.3~fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions collected in 2012 by the CMS experiment at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 8~TeV. For higgsino masses between about 270 and 350~GeV, the expected 95\% confidence-level upper limits on the cross section reach the level of the predicted production cross section. Because of a slight excess in the observed number of events compared to the estimated background, no exclusion is obtained for any higgsino mass value.