Searching exotic Higgs bosons at the LHC

We analyse in a model independent way the possibilities of digging out neutral exotic Higgs states, should they exist endowed with unconventional couplings with ordinary matter and gauge fields, at the 14 TeV run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), adding some comparative studies for 13.6 and 13 TeV runs. Flavor models, based on some discrete symmetry groups, with extended scalar sectors are known to yield exotic spin-0 states, both CP-even and CP-odd, with purely flavor off-diagonal Yukawa couplings. The gauge interaction of one such CP-even state is also unusual that, unlike the Standard Model Higgs boson, it does not couple to gauge boson pairs. Such unconventional properties immune these exotic states from receiving traditional collider and electroweak constraints, and hence those states could be light. Without committing to any specific model, exploiting their peculiar Yukawa and gauge properties, we explore the discovery potential of those exotic Higgs states through some interesting topologies by figuring out some specific kinematic variables that suppress the backgrounds.
Comment: 1+23 pages, 8 captioned figures: v2: Discussions on scalar and pseudoscalar Yukawa couplings in the light of D-D(bar) mixing included; v3: 1+24 pages, 11 captioned figures, more benchmark points studied including systematic uncertainties in a new Section with additional figures and tables. Minor change in manuscript title. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D