QCD corrections to heavy quark pair production in polarized $\gamma \gamma$ collisions and the intermediate-mass Higgs boson signal

Perturbative QCD one-loop corrections to the cross sections of the $b\overline{b}\left(c\overline{c}\right)$ quark pair production in polarized photon-photon collisions, as well as cross sections of the radiative processes $\gamma \gamma \to b\overline{b}g, c\overline{c}g$, leading to two- and three-jet final states are calculated. It is shown that the signal from the intermediate-mass Higgs boson is observable and precise measurements of the Higgs boson two-photon width are possible at a photon-photon collider, although the statistical significance is substantially reduced with respect to the tree-level calculations. We demonstrate that virtual corrections are of the same order as or larger than the Born contribution in the $J_z=0\mathrm{}$ channel at high energy for small values of the cutoff $y_{\mathrm{cut}}$ separating two-jet from three-jet topologies. The nature of these large corrections is elucidated. For $b\overline{b}$ pair production at $\sqrt{s_{\gamma \gamma }}\sim 100$ GeV and for small values of $y_{\mathrm{cut}}<~0.04$ the higher-order resummation of double logarithmic terms $O\left(\frac{{\alpha }_s{m}_b^2}{s{\ln }^2\left(\frac{s}{m_b^2}\right)}\right)$ is needed.