Measurement of electrons from beauty hadron decays in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 7$ TeV

TL;DR

This paper reports the measurement of electrons from beauty hadron decays in proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV, providing insights into heavy-flavor production and testing perturbative QCD predictions.

Contribution

First measurement of electrons from beauty hadron decays at 7 TeV in pp collisions using vertex displacement techniques.

Findings

Electrons from beauty decays were successfully identified and measured.

The measured cross section agrees with perturbative QCD calculations.

Extrapolation to full phase space yields the total beauty production cross section.

Abstract

The production cross section of electrons from semileptonic decays of beauty hadrons was measured at mid-rapidity (|y| < 0.8) in the transverse momentum range $1 < p_{\rm T} < 8$ Gev/$c$ with the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC in pp collisions at a center of mass energy $\sqrt{s} = 7$ TeV using an integrated luminosity of 2.2 nb$^{-1}$. Electrons from beauty hadron decays were selected based on the displacement of the decay vertex from the collision vertex. A perturbative QCD calculation agrees with the measurement within uncertainties. The data were extrapolated to the full phase space to determine the total cross section for the production of beauty quark-antiquark pairs.