Associated production of Higgs and weak bosons, with H→bb̄, at hadron colliders

We consider the search for the Higgs boson at a high-luminosity Fermilab Tevatron (s =2 TeV), an upgraded Tevatron of energy s =3.5 TeV, and the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC, s =14 TeV), via WH/ZH production followed by H→bb̄ and leptonic decay of the weak vector bosons. We show that each of these colliders can potentially observe the standard Higgs boson in the intermediate-mass range 80 GeV<mH<120 GeV. This mode complements the search for and the study of the intermediate-mass Higgs boson via H→γγ at the LHC. In addition, it can potentially be used to observe the lightest Higgs scalar of the minimal supersymmetric model, h, in a region of parameter space not accessible to CERN LEP II or the LHC (using h→γγ,ZZ*).