Diphoton Background to Higgs Boson Production at the LHC with Soft Gluon Effects

TL;DR

This paper improves the theoretical prediction of diphoton backgrounds at the LHC by applying soft-gluon resummation techniques, including exact one-loop contributions, to aid Higgs boson searches.

Contribution

It introduces a soft-gluon resummed calculation for diphoton production, incorporating exact one-loop g g to gamma gamma contributions, enhancing background modeling accuracy.

Findings

Resummed cross section provides reliable predictions for diphoton invariant mass and transverse momentum distributions.

Inclusion of one-loop g g to gamma gamma contribution improves the theoretical accuracy.

Proposes a Higgs search strategy using diphoton mode with a transverse momentum cut, without requiring tagged jets.

Abstract

The detection and the measurement of the production cross section of a light Higgs boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider demand the accurate prediction of the background distributions of photon pairs. To improve this theoretical prediction, we present the soft-gluon resummed calculation of the $p p \to \gamma \gamma X$ cross section, including the exact one loop $g g \to \gamma \gamma g$ contribution. By incorporating the known fixed order results and the leading terms in the higher order corrections, the resummed cross section provides a reliable prediction for the inclusive diphoton invariant mass and transverse momentum distributions. Given our results, we propose the search for the Higgs boson in the inclusive diphoton mode with a cut on the transverse momentum of the photon pair, without the requirement of an additional tagged jet.