Discussion session on diffractive Higgs production

One of the main goals of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at CERN is the search for, discovery and measurement of the Higgs boson, the particle associated with the field that can provide a mechanism for electroweak symmetry breaking in the Standard Model. The mass of the Higgs boson is unknown but precise measurements of electroweak processes hint towards a value below 196 GeV (95% C.L.). Direct searches exclude a Higgs with a mass smaller than 114.1 GeV (95% C.L.). If Supersymmetry will turn out to be the mechanism that stabelizes the Standard Model at high energies, then the theoretically preferred region for the (lightest) Higgs mass is below 135 GeV. Measuring a light Higgs at the LHC will not be an easy task [1], but rather a delicate trade-off between signal and background. E.g. inclusive Higgs production with the Higgs decaying into its most favourable mode, bb, cannot be used to discover the Higgs due to the too high background of bb production. It is therefore important to explore more, in particular clean, processes which would allow to discover the Higgs boson. Recently, renewed attention has been drawn to diffractive Higgs production [2], being first discussed –as well as heavy quark production – in [3].