IS THE CHANNEL H-]B(B)OVER-BAR OBSERVABLE AT LHC

A detailed study of associated Standard Model Higgs production (WH and t ($) over bar tH) at the LHC (or a possible upgraded Tevatron collid er), where the Higgs boson decays to b ($) over bar b pairs, is report ed for 80 < m(H) < 120 GeV. Even for optimistic b-tagging performances of the detector, the signal cannot be cleanly extracted from the back ground. For an integrated luminosity of 10(4) pb(-1) and m(H) = 100 Ge V, one can expect at best similar to 110 reconstructed H-->b ($) over bar b decays from WH production, above a resonant background of simila r to 150 WZ events and a non-resonant background of similar to 4800 ev ents, and similar to 100 reconstructed bt pairs (of which similar to 5 0 from H --> b ($) over bar b decay) from t ($) over bar tH production , above a background of similar to 4000 events. The main difficulty in extracting these two channels is in the expected low signal rate afte r reconstruction, the need for accurate control of all the background sources and for extremely good b-tagging performance. Nevertheless, fo r a few years of running at a luminosity of 10(33) cm(-2)s(-1), the H --> b ($) over bar b channel may be the best way to probe the region 8 0 < m(H) < 100 GeV.