On the intrinsic bottom content of the nucleon

TL;DR

This paper shows that the intrinsic heavy quark content in the nucleon evolves independently, enabling modeling of intrinsic bottom distributions and assessing their impact on LHC processes without full global analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a non-singlet evolution approach for intrinsic heavy quarks, allowing simplified analysis and modeling of intrinsic bottom distributions in the nucleon.

Findings

Intrinsic heavy quark evolution is governed by non-singlet equations.

Modeling of intrinsic bottom distributions is feasible and impacts LHC predictions.

The method can be extended to intrinsic charm with certain limitations.

Abstract

We demonstrate that to a very good approximation the scale-evolution of the intrinsic heavy quark content of the nucleon is governed by non-singlet evolution equations. This allows us to analyze the intrinsic heavy quark distributions without having to resort to a full-fledged global analysis of parton distribution functions. This freedom is then exploited to model intrinsic bottom distributions which are so far missing in the literature in order to estimate the impact of this non-perturbative contribution to the bottom-quark PDF, and on parton--parton luminosities at the LHC. This technique can be applied to the case of intrinsic charm, albeit within the limitations outlined in the following.