Di-photon production at the LHC

The 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 $\gamma \gamma$ channel.