Diphoton production in association with two bottom jets

Understand

We study the production of a photon pair in association with two bottom jets at the LHC.

• This process constitutes an important background to double Higgs production with the subsequent decay of the two Higgs bosons into a pair of photons and b-quarks respectively.
• We calculate this process at next-to-leading order accuracy in QCD and find that QCD corrections lead to a substantial increase of the production cross section due to new channels opening up at next-to-leading order and their inclusion is therefore inevitable for a reliable prediction.
• Furthermore, the approximation of massless b-quarks is scrutinized by calculating the process with both massless and massive b-quarks.