Higgs boson production in photon-photon interactions with proton, light-ion, and heavy-ion beams at current and future colliders

Abstract: The production of the Higgs boson in photon-photon interactions with proton and nucleus beams at three planned or proposed future CERN colliders --- the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), the high-energy LHC (HE-LHC), and the Future Circular Collider (FCC) --- is studied. The cross sections for the process AA$\xrightarrow{\gamma\gamma}$(A)H(A), with the ions A surviving the interaction and the Higgs scalar exclusively produced, are computed with MadGraph 5 modified to include the corresponding elastic $\gamma$ fluxes, for Pb-Pb, Xe-Xe, Kr-Kr, Ar-Ar, O-O, p-Pb, and p-p over the nucleon-nucleon collision energy range $\sqrt{s}\approx 3$--100 TeV. Simulations of the $\gamma\gamma\to H \to b\bar{b}$ decay mode --- including realistic (mis)tagging and reconstruction efficiencies for the final-state b-jets, as well as appropriate kinematical selection criteria to reduce the similarly computed $\gamma\gamma\to b\bar{b},c\bar{c},q\bar{q}$ continuum backgrounds --- have been carried out. Taking into account the expected luminosities for all systems, the yields and significances for observing the Higgs boson in ultraperipheral collisions (UPCs) are estimated. At the HL-LHC and HE-LHC, the colliding systems with larger Higgs significance are Ar-Ar(6.3 TeV) and Kr-Kr(12.5 TeV) respectively, but $3\sigma$ evidence for two-photon Higgs production would require 200 and 30 times larger integrated luminosities than those planned today at both machines. Factors of ten can be gained by running for a year, rather than the typical 1-month heavy-ion LHC operation, but the process will likely remain unobserved until a higher energy hadron collider, such as the FCC, is built. In the latter machine, the $5\sigma$ observation of Higgs production in UPCs is feasible in just the first nominal run of Pb-Pb and p-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 39$ and 63 TeV respectively.