Two photon background for Higgs boson searches at the LHC

Abstract

The search for an intermediate mass Higgs boson at the LHC needs the quantitative understanding of the two-photon background. A calculation of two-photon production in hadronic collisions at full next-to-leading order is described. It includes photons originating from the hadronization of QCD partons which play an important role at the LHC. A prediction for the invariant mass distribution for photon pairs at the LHC is presented and finally the residual scale dependencies are discussed.

Comments: 4 pages, latex (uses moriond style file), 2 eps-figures included. Talk presented at the 35th Rencontres de Moriond, QCD and High Energy Hadronic Interactions, Les Arcs, France, March 18-25, 2000