Speaker
Description
We present a study the two-photon production of the Higgs boson, gamma-gamma->H, at the LHC and Future Circular Collider (FCC) in ultraperipheral PbPb and pPb collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 5.5, 8.8, 39 and 63 TeV. Signal and background events are generated with MADGRAPH 5, including gamma fluxes from the proton and lead ions in the equivalent photon approximation, yielding sigma(gamma-gamma->H) = 18 pb, 0.17 pb at the LHC and 1.75 nb and 1.5 pb at the FCC in PbPb and pPb collisions respectively. We analyse the H->b-bbar decay channel including realistic reconstruction efficiencies for the final-state b-jets, showered and hadronized with PYTHIA 8, as well as appropriate selection criteria to reduce the dominant exclusive gamma-gamma->b-bbar continuum background. Observation of the Higgs boson is achievable in the first FCC year with the expected PbPb integrated luminosities.
