Boosting Higgs pair production in the bbbb final state with multivariate techniques

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 mea...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rojo, J, Behr, J, Bortoletto, D, Frost, J, Hartland, N, Issever, C
Format: Journal article
Published: Springer Verlag 2016
Description
Summary: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 b ¯bb¯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 L = 3 ab−1 , a signal significance of S/√ B ' 3 is obtained, indicating that the b ¯bb¯b final state alone could allow for the observation of double Higgs production at the High Luminosity LHC.