Boosting Higgs pair production in the [Formula: see text] final state with multivariate techniques.

Abstract

The measurement of Higgs pair production will be a cornerstone of the LHC program in the coming years. Double Higgs production provides a crucial window upon the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking and has a unique sensitivity to the Higgs trilinear coupling. We study the feasibility of a measurement of Higgs pair production in the bbar{b}bbar{b} final state at the LHC. Our analysis is based on a combination of traditional cut-based methods with state-of-the-art multivariate techniques. We account for all relevant backgrounds, including the contributions from light and charm jet mis-identification, which are ultimately comparable in size to the irreducible 4b QCD background. We demonstrate the robustness of our analysis strategy in a high pileup environment. For an integrated luminosity of {mathcal {L}}=3 ab^{-1}, a signal significance of S/sqrt{B}simeq 3 is obtained, indicating that the bbar{b}bbar{b} final state alone could allow for the observation of double Higgs production at the High Luminosity LHC.