  The production of W pairs from the one-loop gluon fusion process is studied.
Formulas are presented for the helicity amplitudes keeping the top mass finite,
but all other quark masses zero. The correlations among the leptons coming from
the W bosons are kept. The contribution of this background to the Higgs boson
search in the WW decay mode at the LHC is estimated by applying the cuts
foreseen in experimental searches using the PYTHIA Monte Carlo program.
Kinematic distributions for the final state leptons are compared to those of
the Higgs boson signal and of the q qbar -> WW background. After applying final
cuts, the gg background is found to be large, at the level of 35% of the q qbar
background.The characteristics of the gg background are very similar to those
of the signal. Therefore, an experimental normalization of this background
component appears to be very difficult and the uncertainty must largely be
determined by theory. As a result, the significance of a Higgs signal in the gg
-> H -> WW mode at the LHC is reduced.
