Measurement of the inclusive electron cross-section from the decays of heavy flavour hadrons in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at ATLAS

TL;DR

This paper reports a measurement of the inclusive electron cross-section from heavy flavour hadron decays in proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV, using ATLAS data, and compares results with theoretical predictions.

Contribution

It provides the first measurement of the inclusive electron spectrum from heavy flavour decays at 7 TeV in pp collisions and compares it with advanced theoretical models.

Findings

Measured electron cross-section agrees with NLO theoretical predictions.

Electron spectrum observed in the transverse momentum range 7-26 GeV.

Background subtraction effectively isolates heavy flavour decay electrons.

Abstract

We present the measurement of the inclusive electron spectrum in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, using 1.3 pb-1 of data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Signal electrons in the transverse momentum range 7 < pt < 26 GeV and within |eta| <2.0, excluding 1.37<|eta|<1.52, are extracted from the dominant hadron and conversion backgrounds. After subtraction of the small W/Z/gamma* contribution, the cross-section as a function of pt is found to be in good agreement with theoretical predictions for heavy flavour production from Fixed Order NLO calculations with Next-to-Leading-Log high pt resummation.