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

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.