Diffractive W + 2 jet production: a background to exclusive H \to WW production at hadron colliders

Abstract

Central exclusive double diffractive Higgs boson production, p p \to p + H + p, is now recognised as an important search scenario for the LHC. We consider the case when the Higgs boson decays to two W bosons, one of which may be off-mass-shell, that subsequently decay to the q qbar l nu final state. An important background to this is from the QCD process g g \to W q qbar, where the two gluons are required to be in a J_z=0, colour-singlet state. We perform an explicit calculation and investigate the salient properties of this potentially important background process.