The Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) is a proposed facility which
will explore the high energy and intensity frontier by scattering 60 GeV electrons off
the LHC protons. The simultaneous running with the
high-luminosity LHC opens a physics potential complementary to the LHC pp programme.
In particular, such an ep collider may assist in transforming the LHC
into a genuine Higgs factory and search machine with high precision measurements of the
quark-gluon dynamics of the proton.
In ep collisions, the 125 GeV Higgs-like particle can be be produced via W (Z) boson fusion in
charged (neutral) current interactions at a c.m.s. energy of 1.3 TeV.
A target luminosity of up to $10^{34} cm^{-2} s^{-1}$ makes the LHeC a most
interesting facility for studying the Higgs boson in its heavy flavour decays but also in its rarer
decays, owing also to the rather clean experimental conditions, e.g. no
pile-up and lower QCD background rates as compared to the LHC.
The presentation focuses on the status of evaluation of the Higgs physics prospects in ep and it also presents an overview on the energy frontier physics enabled with the LHeC as well as of current developments of the machine and a new ep detector.
The 60 GeV electron beam when combined with a planned 50 TeV proton collider (FCC) would open the exciting option of studying double Higgs production.
