Revisiting the $B^{(*)}_s$-Meson Production at the Hadronic Colliders

TL;DR

This paper compares two theoretical schemes for predicting $B^{(*)}_s$ meson production at hadronic colliders, highlighting differences and potential for experimental validation at the LHC.

Contribution

It introduces the use of the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNS) for $B^{(*)}_s$ production, contrasting it with the fixed-flavor-number scheme (FFNS), and discusses their implications.

Findings

Differences between schemes are small at Tevatron.

Significant differences appear at LHC energies.

Future LHC data can validate the more accurate scheme.

Abstract

The production of heavy-flavored hadron at the hadronic colliders provides a challenging opportunity to test the validity of pQCD predictions. There are two mechanisms for the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction, i.e. the gluon-gluon fusion mechanism via the subprocess $g+g\rightarrow B^{(*)}_s+b+\bar{s}$ and the extrinsic heavy quark mechanism via the subprocesses $g+\bar{b}\to B^{(*)}_s +\bar{s}$ and $g+s\to B^{(*)}_s +b$, both of which shall have sizable contributions in proper kinematic region. Different from the fixed-flavor-number scheme (FFNS) previously adopted in the literature, we study the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction under the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNS), in which we can consistently deal with the double counting problem from the above two mechanisms. Properties for the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction are discussed. To be useful reference, a comparative study of FFNS and GM-VFNS is presented. Both of which can provide reasonable estimations for the $B^{(*)}_s$ hadroproduction. At the Tevatron, the difference between these two schemes is small, however such difference is obvious at the LHC. The forthcoming more precise data on LHC shall provide a good chance to check which scheme is more appropriate to deal with the $B^{(*)}_s$-meson production and to further study the heavy quark components in hadrons.