Light Higgs production at the Compton Collider

Abstract

We have studied the production of a light Higgs boson with a mass of 120 GeV in photon-photon collisions at a Compton collider. The event generator for the backgrounds to a Higgs signal due to bbbar and ccbar heavy quark pair production in polarized gamma-gamma collisions is based on a complete next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD calculation. For J_z=0 the large double-logarithmic corrections up to four loops are also included. It is shown that the two-photon width of the Higgs boson can be measured with high statistical accuracy of about 2 % for integrated gamma-gamma luminosity in the hard part of the spectrum of 40 fb**-1. As a result the total Higgs boson width can be calculated in a model independent way to an accuracy of about 14 %

submitted to the proceedings of the International Workshop on Linear Colliders (LCWS99) at Sitges, Spain, 28 April - 5 May 1999