Photon-tagged and B-meson-tagged b-jet production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper presents theoretical predictions for photon-tagged and B-meson-tagged b-jet production at the LHC, providing insights into heavy flavor production and modification in nuclear matter, with implications for upcoming lead-lead collision data.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed theoretical analysis of tagged b-jet production at 5.1 TeV, highlighting differences in energy loss and momentum imbalance between heavy and light flavor jets in nuclear environments.

Findings

Photon-tagged b-jets show smaller momentum imbalance shift in nuclear matter.

B-meson tagging effectively identifies prompt b-quark jets.

Large cross section suppression occurs without significant momentum imbalance change.

Abstract

Tagged jet measurements in high energy hadronic and nuclear reactions provide constraints on the energy and parton flavor origin of the parton shower that recoils against the tagging particle. Such additional insight can be especially beneficial in illuminating the mechanisms of heavy flavor production in proton-proton collisions at the LHC and their modification in the heavy ion environment, which are not fully understood. With this motivation, we present theoretical results for isolated-photon-tagged and B-meson-tagged b-jet production at center-of-mass energy 5.1 TeV for comparison to the upcoming lead-lead data. We find that photon-tagged b-jets exhibit smaller momentum imbalance shift in nuclear matter, and correspondingly smaller energy loss, than photon-tagged light flavor jets. Our results show that B-meson tagging is most effective in ensuring that the dominant fraction of recoiling jets originate from prompt b-quarks. Interestingly, in this channel the large suppression of the cross section is not accompanied by a significant momentum imbalance shift.