Soft Double-Diffractive Higgs Production at Hadron Colliders

Abstract

We evaluate the non-perturbative contribution to the double-diffractive production of the Higgs boson, which arises due to the QCD scale anomaly if the mass of the Higgs M_H is smaller than the mass of the top quark M_T, M_H < M_T. The cross section appears to be larger than expected from perturbative calculations; we find \sigma_H = 0.019 - 0.14 pbarn at the Tevatron energy, and \sigma_H = 0.01 - 0.27 pbarn at the energy of the LHC.

Comments: 16 pages, LaTeX, 7 figures