Maximum Significance at the LHC and Higgs Decays to Muons

We present a new way to define and compute the maximum significance achievable for signal and background processes at the LHC, using all available phase space information. As an example, we show that a light Higgs boson produced in weak–boson fusion with a subsequent decay into muons can be extracted from the backgrounds. The method, aimed at phenomenological studies, can be incorporated in parton–level event generators and accommodate parametric descriptions of detector effects for selected observables.