Forward Tagging and Jet Veto Studies for Higgs Events Produced via Vector Boson Fusion

The discovery potential for an intermediate mass Higgs boson produced by vector boson fusion is presently under investigation by the ATLAS Higgs group. The signature for this process is the presence of two forward jets which are used to tag the events, and low hadronic activity in the region between those two jets. In this work the jet reconstruction is performed with a full simulation of the ATLAS detector and it is compared to the fast simulation to extract a set of corrections to be applied in the Higgs analyses. The effect of pile-up is also studied for two different luminosity scenarios showing that the reconstruction of very low P_T (< 20GeV) jets can be a critical issue at the highest LHC design luminosity.