We discuss the central exclusive diffractive production (CEDP) of BSM Higgs bosons at the LHC and quantify the rates and the signal-to-background ratios for these processes.
The main emphasis is on the MSSM Higgs production. Special attention is paid to the studies in the regions of MSSM parameter space where the CEDP is found to have unique advantages as compared to the traditional non-diffractive strategies.
We briefly discuss the Cold Dark matter scenarios as well as the searches for the bosons of a 4th generation model and of the triplet Higgs model.
We show that the physics programme with the tagged forward protons is in many aspects complementary to both, the standard approaches at hadronic colliders, and to the studies at a future linear collider.