Non-resonant Higgs-pair production in the $$b\overline{b}$$ b b ¯ $$b\overline{b}$$ b b ¯ final state at the LHC

We present a particle-level study of the Standard Model non-resonant Higgs-pair production process in the $$b\overline{b}$$ $$b\overline{b}$$ final state, at the Large Hadron Collider at $$\sqrt{s}=14$$ TeV. Each Higgs boson is reconstructed from a pair of close-by jets formed with the anti- $$k_t$$ jet clustering algorithm, with radius parameter $$R=0.4$$ . Given the kinematic properties of the produced Higgs bosons, this Higgs reconstruction approach appears to be more suitable than the use of large-radius jets that was previously proposed in the literature. We find that the sensitivity for observing this final state can be improved significantly when the full set of uncorrelated angular and kinematic variables of the $$4b$$ system is exploited, leading to a statistical significance of 1.8 per experiment with an integrated luminosity of 3 ab $$^{-1}$$ .