Heavy quark flavour dependence of multiparticle production in QCD jets

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heavy quark masses influence multiparticle production in QCD jets, extending the dead cone effect to observable multiplicity differences, which aids in heavy-quark jet identification at colliders.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate heavy quark mass effects into QCD evolution equations and analyzes their impact on jet multiplicities, extending the dead cone effect phenomenology.

Findings

Heavy-quark initiated jets have significantly lower average multiplicity than massless jets.

The study provides a theoretical basis for improved b-tagging techniques at colliders.

Multiparticle correlations are affected by heavy quark mass effects.

Abstract

After inserting the heavy quark mass dependence into QCD partonic evolution equations, we determine the mean charged hadron multiplicity and second multiplicity correlators of jets produced in high energy collisions. We thereby extend the so-called dead cone effect to the phenomenology of multiparticle production in QCD jets and find that the average multiplicity of heavy-quark initiated jets decreases significantly as compared to the massless case, even taking into account the weak decay products of the leading primary quark. We emphasize the relevance of our study as a complementary check of $b$-tagging techniques at hadron colliders like the Tevatron and the LHC.