English

Boosting Higgs pair production in the $b\bar{b}b\bar{b}$ final state with multivariate techniques

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2016-08-03 v3 High Energy Physics - Experiment

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 bbˉbbˉb\bar{b}b\bar{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 4b4b QCD background. We demonstrate the robustness of our analysis strategy in a high pileup environment. For an integrated luminosity of L=3\mathcal{L}=3 ab1^{-1}, a signal significance of S/B3S/\sqrt{B}\simeq 3 is obtained, indicating that the bbˉbbˉb\bar{b}b\bar{b} final state alone could allow for the observation of double Higgs production at the High-Luminosity LHC.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.08928,
  title  = {Boosting Higgs pair production in the $b\bar{b}b\bar{b}$ final state with multivariate techniques},
  author = {J. Katharina Behr and Daniela Bortoletto and James A. Frost and Nathan P. Hartland and Cigdem Issever and Juan Rojo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.08928},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

47 pages, 22 figures. v2: updated references, added comparison of post-MVA kinematic distributions. v3: matches published version in EPJC