HIGGS-BOSON DISCOVERY POTENTIAL OF LHC IN THE CHANNEL PP-]GAMMA-GAMMA+JET

We discuss the SM Higgs discovery potential of LHC in the reaction pp --> H + jet --> gamma gamma + jet when the jet is observed at sufficie ntly high E-t to be reliably identified. We conclude that this channel gives promising discovery possibilities for the Higgs boson mass rang e 100-140 GeV, during LHC operation at a low luminosity. With 30 fb(-1 ) of accumulated data and for M-H = 120 GeV about 100 signal events co uld be observed with the number of background events larger by a facto r of 2 only, showing a signal significance S/root B similar to 7. We u se the difference of distributions in the partonic subprocess energy r oot (s) over cap for the signal and background for a better separation of the signal. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.