Hadronic Radiation Patterns in Vector Boson Fusion Higgs Production

Abstract

We consider the hadronic radiation patterns for the generic process of bb + 2 forward jet production at the LHC, where the (centrally produced) bb originate either from a Higgs, a Z or from standard QCD production processes. A numerical technique for evaluating the radiation patterns for non-trivial final states is introduced and shown to agree with the standard analytic results for more simple processes. Significant differences between the radiation patterns for the Higgs signal and the background processes are observed and quantified. This suggests that hadronic radiation patterns could be used as an additional diagnostic tool in Higgs searches in this channel at the LHC.