Inclusive jet production at Tevatron in the Regge limit of QCD

TL;DR

This paper models inclusive jet, photon, b-jet, and D-meson production at Tevatron energies using Reggeized partons, successfully matching experimental data without parameter tuning and elucidating dominant production mechanisms.

Contribution

It applies the Reggeization approach to describe high-energy hadroproduction processes, providing a unified framework consistent with Tevatron data and detailing the main partonic scattering contributions.

Findings

Reggeized gluon scattering dominates jet production

Reggeized gluon-quark scattering explains b-jet and D-meson production

Reggeized quark-antiquark annihilation accounts for prompt photon production

Abstract

We consider inclusive hadroproduction of jets, prompt photons, b-jets, and D-mesons in the quasi-multi-Regge-kinematics approach based on the hypothesis of gluon and quark Reggeization in t-channel exchanges at high energies. The data taken by the CDF and D0 Collaborations at the Fermilab Tevatron are well described without adjusting parameters. We find the main contribution to inclusive jet production to be the scattering of two Reggeized gluons, described by the effective Reggeon-Reggeon-gluon vertex, and to b-jet and D-meson production --- the scattering of a Reggeized gluon and a Reggeized quark to an ordinary quark, being expressed in terms of the Reggeon-Reggeon-quark vertex. The main contribution to prompt photon production arises from Reggeized quark-Reggeized antiquark annihilation, which is described by the effective Reggeon-Reggeon-photon vertex. Our analysis is based on the Kimber-Martin-Ryskin prescription for unintegrated gluon and quark distribution functions using as input the Martin-Roberts-Stirling-Thorne collinear parton distribution functions of the proton.