SINGLE-FORWARD-JET TAGGING AND CENTRAL-JET VETOING TO IDENTIFY THE LEPTONIC WW DECAY MODE OF A HEAVY HIGGS BOSON

We study the extraction of the heavy-Higgs-boson signal H --> W+W- --> lBAR-nu, l-nu-BAR (l = e or mu) from the standard-model background at hadron supercolliders. By tagging a single forward jet with energy E(j) > 3 TeV and pseudorapidity 3 < /eta(j)/ < 5 and by vetoing central jets of transverse momenta pT(j) > 60 GeV in the pseudorapidity range 0 < /eta(j)/ < 3, the QCD WWj and ttjBAR --> WWbbjBAR backgrounds are suppressed. For m(H) = 1 TeV there are about 46 signal events from electroweak-vector-boson scattering (of which 36 events are of Higgs-boson origin) at the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) for an integrated luminosity of 10 fb-1 and 10 other events from the WWj and ttjBAR backgrounds for m(t) = 140 GeV. The experimental separation of the vector-boson-scattering subprocess is thereby possible. At the CERN Large Hadron Collider, with an E(j) > 2 TeV jet energy cut, all cross sections are about a factor of 10 below the SSC values.