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 Pomeronʹs parton content. In particular, if the Pomeron gluon density fgp(β) is peaked at large β 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.