Inclusive J/psi and psi(2S) production from b-hadron decay in p anti-p and pp collisions

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical study of inclusive J/psi and psi(2S) meson production from b-hadron decays in proton-antiproton and proton-proton collisions, showing excellent agreement with experimental data across various energies and detectors.

Contribution

It applies the next-to-leading order GM-VFNS with nonperturbative fragmentation functions fitted to e+e- data, providing a unified description of charmonium production from b-hadron decays.

Findings

Theoretical predictions match experimental transverse-momentum distributions.

The approach successfully describes data across different collider energies.

The study validates the universality of fragmentation functions in this context.

Abstract

We study the inclusive production of J/psi and psi(2S) mesons originating from the decays of bottom-flavored hadrons produced in p anti-p collisions at the Fermilab Tevatron and in pp collisions at the CERN LHC. We work at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNS) implemented with nonperturbative fragmentation functions fitted to e^+e^- data of inclusive b-hadron production exploiting their universality. The three-momentum distributions of the charmonia used were extracted from B-decay data in the framework of nonrelativistic-QCD factorization. Comparing the theoretical predictions thus obtained with transverse-momentum distributions measured by the CDF II, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb Collaborations, we find excellent overall agreement as for both absolute normalization and lineshape, which provides a nontrivial test of the GM-VFNS over wide ranges of center-of-mass energy, transverse momentum, and rapidity.