An intermediate-mass Higgs boson in two-photon coherent processes at the LHC

Abstract

We reexamine the prospects of searching for a neutral Higgs boson in the intermediate-mass range, using the proton- and ion-beam facilities of the LHC to study coherent two-photon processes. Considering realistic design luminosities for the different ion beams, we find that beams of light-to-medium size ions like calcium will give the highest production rates. With a suitable trigger and assuming a b-quark identification efficiency of $30\%$ and a $b\bar{b}$ mass resolution of 10 GeV one could expect to see a Higgs signal in the $b\bar{b}$ channel with a 3-4 $\sigma$ statistical significance in the first phase of operation of the LHC with beams of calcium.

10 pages of LATEX + 3 Figures (postscript)

References in corpus (3)

• Improved Higgs Mass Stability Bound in the Standard Model and Implications for Supersymmetry
• Phenomenological Implications of the m_t RGE Fixed Point for SUSY Higgs Boson Searches
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Photon-Photon Physics in Very Peripheral Collisions of Relativistic Heavy Ions
• Tagging Two-Photon Production at the LHC
• The rapidity gap Higgs signal at LHC
• Study of Higgs boson production and its b-bbar decay in gamma-gamma processes in proton-nucleus collisions at the LHC
• Photon-Photon and Photon-Hadron Interactions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliders
• Photon-Photon and Photon-Hadron Physics at Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliders
• As an Introduction: Quest for New Physics in Photon-Photon Interactions at the LHC