Soft colour interactions and diffractive Higgs production

Abstract

The topical subject of Higgs production in diffractive hard scattering events at the Tevatron and LHC is discussed. This has been proposed as a Higgs discovery channel with appealing experimental features. Predictions are obtained from the Soft Colour Interaction model, where rapidity gaps are created by a new soft interaction added to the normal hard scattering processes, implemented in the Monte Carlo event generator PYTHIA. A brief review of the successful application of the model to describe all CDF and DO data on diffractive hard scattering, such as production of W/Z, dijets, beauty and J/psi is also given.