Eur. Phys. J. C (2009) 64: 361-371
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-009-1151-7

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Radiative QCD backgrounds to exclusive production: radiation from the screening gluon

¹ Department of Physics and Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, University of Durham, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK
² Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, Gatchina, St. Petersburg, 188300, Russia

^* e-mail: v.a.khoze@durham.ac.uk

Received: 7 July 2009
Revised: 3 September 2009
Published online: 22 September 2009

Abstract

Central exclusive Higgs boson production, pp→p ⊕ H ⊕ p, at the LHC can provide an important complementary contribution to the comprehensive study of the Higgs sector in a remarkably clean topology. The Higgs decay mode is especially attractive, and for certain BSM scenarios may even become the discovery channel. Obvious requirements for the success of such exclusive measurements are strongly suppressed and controllable backgrounds. One potential source of background comes from additional gluon radiation which leads to a three-jet final state. We perform an explicit calculation of the subprocesses , gg→ggg in the case of ‘internal’ gluon radiation from the spectator, t-channel screening gluon, when the two incoming active t-channel gluons form a color octet. We find that the overall contribution of this source of background is orders of magnitude lower than that caused by the main irreducible background resulting from the subprocess. Therefore, this background contribution can be safely neglected.