Light Higgs production at a photon collider

We present a preliminary study of the production of a light Higgs boson with a mass between 120 and 160 GeV in photon–photon collisions at a Compton collider. The event generator for the backgrounds to a Higgs signal due to b̄b and c̄c heavy quark pair production in polarized γγ collisions is based on a complete next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD calculation. For Jz=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 2–10% for integrated γγ luminosity in the hard part of the spectrum of 43 fb−1. From this result the total Higgs boson width can be derived in a model independent way.