A new correlation method to identify and separate charm and bottom production processes at RHIC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a correlation-based method to distinguish charm and bottom quark production in RHIC collisions, enabling better understanding of heavy-quark energy loss and decay contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical correlation technique to separate charm and bottom processes using decay electron and meson tagging, validated with simulations.

Findings

Method successfully distinguishes charm and bottom contributions in simulated data.

Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the correlation approach.

The approach accounts for NLO effects including gluon splitting.

Abstract

Electrons from semileptonic decays of heavy-flavor mesons (D and B) allow to study the energy loss of heavy-quarks in nuclear collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV at RHIC. Since pQCD calculations have shown that the crossing point where bottom decay electrons start to dominate over charm decay electrons is largely unknown, an urgent need arises to access the relative contributions independently. A correlation method is proposed to identify and separate charm and bottom production processes on a statistical basis through tagging of their decay electrons and open charmed mesons. The feasibility for this method is demonstrated using PYTHIA and MC@NLO simulations. The latter allows to estimate the complete NLO contributions, including e.g. gluon-splitting diagrams.