Diffractive W+2 jet production: a background to exclusive H→WW production at hadron colliders

Central exclusive double-diffractive Higgs-boson production, pp→p+H+p, is now recognised as an important search scenario for the LHC. We consider the case when the Higgs boson decays to two W bosons, one of which may be off-mass-shell, that subsequently decay to the q anti qlν final state. An important background to this is from the QCD process gg→Wq anti q, where the two gluons are required to be in a Jz=0, colour-singlet state. We perform an explicit calculation and investigate the salient properties of this potentially important background process. (orig.)