Heavy ion interactions at supercolliders and the search for the Higgs particle

Abstract

We discuss the proposal of detecting an intermediate mass Higgs produced by γγ fusion in heavy ion collisions at LHC and SSC. Even if one was able to perfectly discriminate the strong interaction processes, both the signal rate and the signal over background ratio are shown to be discouraging, once still optimistic but conceivable values for mass resolutions, b tagging efficiencies and light quark rejection factors are taken into account. We also quantitatively argue that rejecting the gg background to the required accuracy on the basis of the p T distributions of the nuclear jets or other similar distributions is not feasible.