A Note on Measuring Charm and Bottom Forward-Backward Asymmetries at the Tevatron

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential to measure charm and bottom quark forward-backward asymmetries at the Tevatron, which could shed light on the anomalously large top quark asymmetry observed.

Contribution

It proposes methods to measure b and c quark asymmetries at the Tevatron using muon and jet kinematics, enhancing understanding of new physics sources.

Findings

Muon asymmetries in high-p_T dijet events could detect A_{FB}^c and A_{FB}^b ~ 0.3

Heavy flavor tagging efficiency impacts measurement sensitivity

Crude estimates suggest feasible measurement strategies

Abstract

The forward-backward asymmetry A_{FB}^t in top quark production at the Tevatron has been seen to be anomalously large both by CDF and D0. Parton-level asymmetries as large as 50%, with a large error bar, have been extracted from the data. It is important to measure other quark asymmetries if possible, as these would help clarify the source of any new physics behind A_{FB}^t. In this note it is argued that asymmetries in b\bar b and c\bar c should be accessible to the Tevatron experiments, using the full data sets. A crude study suggests that muon asymmetries in high-p_T dijet events, with suitable use of muon and jet kinematics and (inefficient) heavy flavor tagging, might allow detection of A_{FB}^c and A_{FB}^b ~ 0.3. Were it possible to make heavy flavor tagging at high p_T efficient, or mistags rare, then the sensitivity of the measurement of A_{FB}^b could be significantly better.