# Diphoton production in association with two bottom jets

## TL;DR

This paper calculates the production of a photon pair with two bottom jets at the LHC at next-to-leading order in QCD, highlighting significant cross section increases and the impact of bottom quark mass assumptions.

## Contribution

It provides the first NLO QCD calculation of diphoton plus two bottom jets, including an analysis of bottom quark mass effects and PDF choices.

## Key findings

- QCD corrections significantly increase the cross section.
- Massive bottom quarks reduce the cross section.
- Four-flavor PDFs lead to smaller cross sections.

## Abstract

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. We find that the massive bottom quark leads to a substantial reduction of the cross section where the biggest effect is however due to the use of a four flavor PDF set and the corresponding smaller values for the strong coupling constant.