Estimating Diffractive Higgs Boson Production at LHC from HERA Data

Using a recently proposed factorization hypothesis for semi-inclusive hard processes in QCD, one can study, in principle, the diffractive production of the Standard Model Higgs boson at LHC using only, as input, $ep$ diffractive hard-processes data of the type recently collected and analyzed by the H1 and ZEUS collaborations at HERA. While waiting for a more precise and complete set of data, we combine here the existing data with a simple Pomeron-exchange picture and find a large spread in the Higgs boson production cross section, depending on the input parametrization of the Pomeron's parton content. In particular, if the Pomeron gluon density $f_{g/P}(\beta)$ is peaked at large $\beta$ for small scales, single diffractive events will represent a sizeable fraction of all produced Higgs bosons with an expected better-than-average signal-to-background ratio.