Isolating a light Higgs boson from the di-photon background at the LHC

Carl Schmidt; Lance Dixon; Zvi Bern

RECORD

Isolating a light Higgs boson from the di-photon background at the LHC

Zvi Bern, Lance Dixon, Carl Schmidt

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Submitted 20 Jun 2002

abstract compiled · 2026-09-23 · no language-model review

The authors' main claim We also investigate ways to enhance the statistical significance of the Higgs signal in the di-photon channel.

how it is stated · asserted 0.50 read the record →

Comment (0) Read on arXiv ↗

Cite ▾

arXiv IDhep-ph/0206194 (version 2)

Pith IDRGD7G3WV, Pith's permanent record of this paper and its review

CitationCarl Schmidt, Lance Dixon, Zvi Bern. "Isolating a light Higgs boson from the di-photon background at the LHC." arXiv:hep-ph/0206194 (2002). https://pith.science/paper/RGD7G3WV

Claim paper

The compiled record

The paper's own sentences, arranged. Each label is drawn from a closed vocabulary; the number beside it is the probability the classifier gave that label. Numbers in the tables are the authors', checked by code. No sentence in this record was written by a model.

Open the compiled record

Compiled by classifier-1.13-20260917 via OpenRouter, question bank abstract-p1-20260923, 2026-09-23: 1 request, 2,980 input tokens, $0.0001 reported.

What the abstract itself states, as probabilities: claims first 0.03 · states limitation 0.11 · human participants 0.01 · controlled comparison 0.09 · randomized assignment 0.01 · states quantitative result 0.05 · compares with prior results 0.18 · mentions code or data availability 0.02.

The abstract, sentence by sentence

arXiv listing abstract v2. Results and the main claim are underlined; show every role.

We compute the QCD corrections to the gluon fusion subprocess gg to gamma gamma, which forms an important component of the background to the search for a light Higgs boson at the LHC. We study the dependence of the improved pp to gamma gamma X background calculation on the factorization and renormalization scales, on various choices for photon isolation cuts, and on the rapidities of the photons. We also investigate ways to enhance the statistical significance of the Higgs signal in the di-photon channel.

background contribution method result interpretation main claim

What the classifier reports for each sentence. The number is the probability it gave the label.
#	sentence	role	the authors' own work	states the main conclusion	strength
s0	We compute the QCD corrections to the gluon fusion subprocess gg to gamma gamma, which forms an important component of the background to the search for a light Higgs boson at the LHC.	contribution 0.96	0.94	0.06	asserted 1.00
s1	We study the dependence of the improved pp to gamma gamma X background calculation on the factorization and renormalization scales, on various choices for photon isolation cuts, and on the rapidities of the photons.	contribution 0.89	0.93	0.05	asserted 0.88
s2	We also investigate ways to enhance the statistical significance of the Higgs signal in the di-photon channel.	contribution 0.98	0.87	0.07	asserted 0.50

What kind of paper the classifier reports this is: theoretical result 0.90 · evidence from simulation or computation 0.93.

What was examined, and what was not

sources read

arXiv listing abstract v2

not examined

full text
figures and tables
references and citing sentences
relations to other papers

levels run

P abstract

not run

S sections
T body sentences
C citations
R cross-paper relations

Every quoted sentence on this record is the authors'. Every label is from Pith's closed vocabulary, with the probability shown beside it. Every number in the measurements table is the authors', checked by code. Record as JSON

The paper

Original abstract

We compute the QCD corrections to the gluon fusion subprocess gg to gamma gamma, which forms an important component of the background to the search for a light Higgs boson at the LHC. We study the dependence of the improved pp to gamma gamma X background calculation on the factorization and renormalization scales, on various choices for photon isolation cuts, and on the rapidities of the photons. We also investigate ways to enhance the statistical significance of the Higgs signal in the di-photon channel.

Human review

How Pith checks papers → · Full audit of this paper →

References

Forward citations

Cited by 14 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

Two-loop helicity amplitudes for diphoton production with massive quark loop
hep-ph 2025-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

Two-loop helicity amplitudes for diphoton production with a massive top quark loop are computed, providing new analytic results for gluon fusion and benchmark numbers for both channels.
Maximal Unitarity at Two Loops
hep-th 2011-08 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

Explicit contour-integral formulas compute the coefficients of the two planar double box basis integrals in a massless four-point amplitude to leading order in the dimensional regulator, from products of six tree amplitudes.
Constraints on the Higgs boson total width from on-shell signal-background interference in the $H\to\gamma\gamma$ decay channel with $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV with the ATLAS detector
hep-ex 2026-09 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

The ATLAS Collaboration sets a direct upper limit on the Higgs boson total width Gamma_H < 307 MeV at 95% CL using on-shell signal-background interference in H->gamma gamma decays with 140 fb^-1 of 13 TeV pp collisions.
Complete electroweak corrections to diphoton production via gluon fusion at the LHC
hep-ph 2026-09 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

The first complete NLO electroweak calculation for gg->γγ at the LHC including top quark and Higgs boson contributions finds up to -10% corrections in kinematic tails and threshold structures.
Fiducial $q_T$ resummation of color-singlet processes at N$^3$LL+NNLO
hep-ph 2020-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

A public, process-generic SCET-based qT-resummation framework delivers N3LL+NNLO fiducial predictions for color-singlet processes, with new results for diphoton and Z-gamma production and an analysis of photon-isolati...

Show 9 more citing papers

Predictions for diphoton production at the LHC through NNLO in QCD
hep-ph 2016-03 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

An independent NNLO QCD calculation of diphoton production in MCFM finds the previously published NNLO cross section too high by about 8 percent, an error the earlier authors have since acknowledged.
The two-loop helicity amplitudes for $gg \to V_1 V_2 \to 4~\mathrm{leptons}$
hep-ph 2015-03 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

The authors deliver the first two-loop helicity amplitudes for gluon-fusion production of two off-shell electroweak bosons decaying to four leptons, with analytical results and a public C++ evaluation code.
Bounding the Higgs Boson Width Through Interferometry
hep-ph 2013-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

Next-to-leading-order QCD corrections cut the Higgs-induced diphoton mass shift from about 120 to about 70 MeV, and the shift grows as the square root of the Higgs width, giving an independent handle on that width.
Vector boson pair production at the LHC
hep-ph 2011-04 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

MCFM now supplies next-to-leading-order QCD predictions for all LHC diboson final states, including experimentally isolated photons and gluon-initiated loop contributions, and the numbers agree with the first CMS and ...
Combining Monte Carlo generators with next-to-next-to-leading order calculations: event reweighting for Higgs boson production at the LHC
hep-ph 2006-04 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

Reweighting Monte Carlo events to the NNLO double differential Higgs pT and rapidity distribution gives accurate photon distributions from H to gamma gamma, and leaves H to WW lepton shapes almost unchanged.
Measurement of isolated-photon pair production in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector
hep-ex 2012-11 accept novelty 5.0 of 10

The isolated di-photon cross section in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions is 44.0 (+3.2, -4.2) picobarns for photons above 25 and 22 GeV, with differential spectra in mass, transverse momentum, azimuthal separation and C...
A measurement of the Higgs boson mass in the diphoton decay channel in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV
hep-ex 2026-07 accept novelty 4.0 of 10

CMS measures the Higgs mass in H→γγ with 138 fb⁻¹ at 13 TeV as 125.13 ± 0.15 GeV, and 125.06 ± 0.14 GeV when combined with 7+8 TeV diphoton data.
Physics at a 100 TeV pp collider: Standard Model processes
hep-ph 2016-07 accept novelty 4.0 of 10

At 100 TeV, photon-initiated and electroweak-boson-initiated channels grow to rival quark-antiquark annihilation for multi-TeV Drell-Yan and diboson production, and electroweak splittings appear in multi-TeV jets at t...
Search for signatures of extra dimensions in the diphoton mass spectrum at the Large Hadron Collider
hep-ex 2011-12 accept novelty 4.0 of 10

No diphoton excess appears in 2.2 inverse femtobarns of 7 TeV CMS data, giving 95% CL lower limits of 2.3 to 3.8 TeV on the ADD effective Planck scale and 0.86 to 1.84 TeV on the first RS graviton mass.

How the literature uses it

33 arXiv papers cite this in 59 sentences

Each citing sentence is taken from the citing paper's LaTeX source and typed by Pith's classifier. A label appears at probability 0.8 or more (0.95 for support), a contest at 0.7 or more; the quoted words are the citing authors'. How each label was checked · JSON

Papers citing it · 39 sentences without a confident label

Contests it 1 paper

[ref] presents the two-loop corrections to $gg→γγ$ and the radiative correction $gg→γγg$, but omits a term from the interference between the tree-level and one-loop-level amplitudes for the process $gg→γγqq̅$.

Precision Diboson Observables for the LHC · On the approximations used in $gg→VV$ estimates · contest 0.75

Uses its method or tool 4 papers

The Higgs interaction with the two photons is instead treated using the complete one-loop expression: [equation] where $v≈246$ GeV is the Higgs expectation value, $α= 1/137$ , $N_c^f=3$ (1) for $f=$ quarks (leptons) with electric charge $e_f$ and mass $m_f$, and [equation] For the continuum amplitude we use the five flavor massless box (or pentagon) approximation [ref] .

Transverse-momentum resummation for the signal-background interference in the $H \to \gamma\gamma$ channel at the LHC · Theory overview · 0.80
In particular, we obtain a theoretical prediction for the continuum background as follows: Using gamma2MC [ref] at $√(s)=8,13$, and considering respectively the $q̅q$ and $gg$ initiated processes, we calculate $$-dependent scale factors, $K_q(,√(s))$ and $K_g(,√(s))$, from the ratio of the NLO to LO diphoton spectrum.

Exploring Peaks and Valleys in the Diphoton Spectrum · Data and selections · 1.00
The NLO prediction is calculated with the diphox+ gamma2mc [ref] generators, which take into account the fragmentation processes in which the photons can come from the collinear fragmentations of hard partons.

Search for signatures of extra dimensions in the diphoton mass spectrum at the Large Hadron Collider · Introduction · 1.00

Compares with it 4 papers

The measurements have been compared to a theoretical prediction performed at next-to-leading-order accuracy using the state-of-the-art fixed-order computations [ref] .

Measurement of the Production Cross Section for Pairs of Isolated Photons in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV · Summary · 0.99
[ref] , which were implemented previously in MCFM [ref] .

Predictions for diphoton production at the LHC through NNLO in QCD · Validation · 0.92
As a further test we compared our SM results with those in [ref] .

Direct photon pair production at the LHC to order alpha_s in TeV scale gravity models · Numerical Results · 1.00

Cites it as support 2 papers

Mainly because of the large gluon parton density function (PDF), the gluon fusion process, although higher order in strong coupling in comparison to the quark anti-quark annihilation process, is not negligible and gives a significant contribution to the cross-section [ref] .

The top threshold effect in the $\gamma\gamma$ production at the LHC · Introduction · 0.97
[ref] ), which we will include explicitly below.

Precision Diboson Observables for the LHC · NNLO QCD corrections · 0.96

Cites it as background 7 papers

Prior to our work, the state of the art for this process included scattering amplitudes in the massless case up to NNLO [ref] and for the massive case the $gg →γγ$ with partial N$^3$LO contributions [ref] .

Full NNLO QCD corrections to diphoton production · Introduction · 0.94
[ref] and more recently massive top loops have also been included at this order [ref] .

Master Integrals for Electroweak corrections to $gg \to\gamma\gamma$ -- Light quark contributions · Introduction · 0.88
At the next-to-next-to leading order (NNLO) in QCD we have the $𝒪(α^2_ewα^2_s)$ contribution to the cross-section from double-virtual, real-virtual and real-real diagrams [ref] .

The top threshold effect in the $\gamma\gamma$ production at the LHC · Introduction · 0.82

Discussion

Know something about this paper? Leave a comment, or highlight any passage above to comment on it.