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 bbˉbbˉ 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 bbˉbbˉ final state alone could allow for the
observation of double Higgs production at the High-Luminosity LHC.Comment: 47 pages, 22 figures. v2: updated references, added comparison of
post-MVA kinematic distributions. v3: matches published version in EPJ