Diffractive Higgs boson photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions at LHC

Abstract

A new production mechanism for the standard model Higgs boson in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC, which allows central exclusive diffractive production by double pomeron exchange in photonproton processes, is presented. The Higgs boson is centrally produced by gluon fusion with two large rapidity gaps emerging in the final state, being the main experimental signature for this process. As already studied for Pomeron-Pomeron and two-photon processes, the Higgs boson photoproduction is studied within this new mechanism in proton-proton (pp) and proton-nucleus (pA) collisions, where each system has a different dynamics to be taken into account. As a result, this mechanism predicts a production cross section for pp collisions of about 1.8 fb, which is similar to that obtained in Pomeron-Pomeron processes. Besides, in pPb collisions the cross sections have increased to about 0.6 pb, being comparable with the results of two-photon processes in pAu collisions. Therefore, as the rapidity gap survival probability is an open question in high-energy physics, an analysis for different values of this probability shows how competitive the mechanisms are in the LHC kinematical regime.