  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.
