The process gg -> WW as a background to the Higgs signal at the LHC

Abstract

The production of W pairs from the one-loop gluon fusion process is studied. Formulas are presented for the helicity amplitudes keeping the top mass finite, but all other quark masses zero. The correlations among the leptons coming from the W bosons are kept. The contribution of this background to the Higgs boson search in the WW decay mode at the LHC is estimated by applying the cuts foreseen in experimental searches using the PYTHIA Monte Carlo program. Kinematic distributions for the final state leptons are compared to those of the Higgs boson signal and of the q qbar -> WW background. After applying final cuts, the gg background is found to be large, at the level of 35% of the q qbar background.The characteristics of the gg background are very similar to those of the signal. Therefore, an experimental normalization of this background component appears to be very difficult and the uncertainty must largely be determined by theory. As a result, the significance of a Higgs signal in the gg -> H -> WW mode at the LHC is reduced.

24 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (17)

• Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (in "The Review of Particle Properties" 2004)
• High-Energy-Physics Event Generation with PYTHIA 6.1
• Automatized One-Loop Calculations in 4 and D dimensions
• Global QCD Analysis of Parton Structure of the Nucleon: CTEQ5 Parton Distributions
• An update on vector boson pair production at hadron colliders
• Vector Boson Pair Production in Hadronic Collisions at Order ${\alpha }_s$: Lepton Correlations and Anomalous Couplings
• Two-Loop Amplitudes for Gluon Fusion into Two Photons
• Observing H -> W*W* -> e mu pT(miss) in weak boson fusion with dual forward jet tagging at the LHC
• Prospects for the Search for a Standard Model Higgs Boson in ATLAS using Vector Boson Fusion
• How to find a Higgs Boson with a Mass between 155--180 GeV at the LHC
• H-->WW as the discovery mode for a light Higgs boson
• Helicity Amplitudes for $\mathcal{O}({\alpha }_s)$ Production of $W^{+}{W}^{-},W^{\pm }Z,ZZ,W^{\pm }\gamma ,$ or $Z\gamma$ Pairs at Hadron Colliders
• Hadronic $ZZ$, $W^{-}{W}^{+}$, and $W^{\pm }Z$ Production with QCD Corrections and Leptonic Decays
• Gluon-induced WW background to Higgs boson searches at the LHC
• Finite-Width Effects in Top Quark Production at Hadron Colliders
• Leptonic Signals from off-shell Z Boson Pairs at Hadron Colliders
• Exploiting $h\to W^{\ast }{W}^{\ast }$ Decays at the Upgraded Fermilab Tevatron

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Gluon-induced W-boson pair production at the LHC
• Vector-boson pair production at the LHC to $\mathcal{O}({\alpha }^3)$ accuracy
• Electroweak corrections to W-boson pair production at the LHC
• Taming the off-shell Higgs boson
• Inclusive Higgs boson cross-section for the LHC at 8 TeV
• NLO QCD corrections to the production of W+ W- plus two jets at the LHC
• Soft-gluon effects in WW production at hadron colliders
• Resolving gluon fusion loops at current and future hadron colliders
• Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to $W^{+}{W}^{-}$ production at the LHC in Randall Sundrum model
• $W^{+}{W}^{-}$ production in Large extra dimension model at next-to-leading order in QCD at the LHC
• Normalizing Weak Boson Pair Production at the Large Hadron Collider
• The process gg->WW as a probe into the EWSB mechanism
• Standard and SUSY Higgs production at the LHC
• New one-loop techniques and first applications to LHC phenomenology