2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/42560The standard model production of two photons is one of the most important backgrounds to light Higgs boson production at the LHC. In this talk we discuss the di-photon background, with emphasis on the effects of the recently calculated next-to-leading-order (NLO) corrections to the gluon-gluon-initiated component. We find that the $K$-factor for this component is smaller than that for the analogous $gg\to H$ process, and that the correction to the total irreducible di-photon production is modest. We also investigate ways to enhance the statistical significance of the Higgs signal in the $γγ$ channel.4 pages, talk given at XXXVIIIth Rencontres de Moriond, QCD and High Energy Hadronic Interactions, Les Arcs, France, March 22-29, 2003High Energy Physics - Phenomenologytext