Measurement of the cross section for direct-photon production in association with a heavy quark in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 1.96 TeV

TL;DR

This paper measures the cross section of direct-photon production with heavy quarks in proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV, providing data for testing quantum chromodynamics predictions.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive measurement of this process over a wide photon transverse momentum range using the full Tevatron dataset.

Findings

Results agree with some theoretical models

Data constrains heavy-quark parton distribution functions

Photon-jet correlations observed

Abstract

We report on a measurement of the cross section for direct-photon production in association with a heavy quark using the full data set of $\sqrt{s}=1.96$ TeV proton-antiproton collisions corresponding to 9.1 fb$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. The measurements are performed as a function of the photon transverse momentum, covering photon transverse momentum between 30 and 300 GeV, photon rapidities $|y^{\gamma}|<1.0$, heavy-quark-jet transverse momentum $p_{T}^{jet}>20$ GeV, and jet rapidities $|y^{jet}|<1.5$. The results are compared with several theoretical predictions.