Light Higgs Production at a Photon Collider

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of photon-photon collisions at a Compton collider to produce and measure a light Higgs boson with high precision, including detailed background modeling and NLO QCD calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive NLO QCD event generator for background processes and demonstrates precise measurement capabilities for the Higgs two-photon width at a photon collider.

Findings

Higgs two-photon width can be measured with 2-10% accuracy.

The total Higgs width can be derived model-independently.

Background processes are modeled with complete NLO calculations.

Abstract

We present a preliminary study of the production of a light Higgs boson with a mass between 120 and 160 GeV in photon-photon collisions at a Compton collider. The event generator for the backgrounds to a Higgs signal due to bbbar and ccbar heavy quark pair production in polarized Gamma-Gamma collisions is based on a complete next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD calculation. For J_z=0 the large double-logarithmic corrections up to four loops are also included. It is shown that the two-photon width of the Higgs boson can be measured with high statistical accuracy of about 2-10% for integrated Gamma-Gamma luminosity in the hard part of the spectrum of 43 fb-1. From this result the total Higgs boson width can be derived in a model independent way.