RAPIDITY GAPS AND JETS AS A NEW-PHYSICS SIGNATURE IN VERY-HIGH-ENERGY HADRON-HADRON COLLISIONS

In hadron-hadron collisions, production of Higgs bosons and other color-singlet systems can occur via fusion of electroweak bosons, occasionally leaving a ''rapidity gap'' in the underlying-event structure. This observation, due to Dokshitzer, Khoze, and Troyan. is studied to see whether it serves as a signature for detection of the Higgs bosons, etc. We find it is a very strong signature at subprocess c.m. energies in excess of a few TeV. The most serious problem with this strategy is the estimation of the fraction of events containing the rapidity gap; most of the time the gap is filled by soft interactions of spectator degrees of freedom. We also study this question and estimate this ''survival probability of the rapidity gap'' to be of order 5%, with an uncertainty of a factor 3. Ways of testing this estimate and further discussion of the underlying bard-diffraction physics are presented.