Non-perturbative bottom PDF and its possible impact on new physics searches

TL;DR

This paper investigates the non-perturbative intrinsic bottom quark distribution in the nucleon and its potential effects on LHC processes, challenging the common perturbative assumption in PDF analyses.

Contribution

It demonstrates that intrinsic heavy quark PDFs evolve via non-singlet equations and models their impact on LHC parton luminosities, introducing a non-perturbative component.

Findings

Intrinsic bottom PDFs follow non-singlet evolution

Modeling shows potential impact on LHC luminosities

Challenges perturbative assumptions in heavy quark PDFs

Abstract

Heavy quark parton distribution functions (PDFs) play an important role in several Standard Model and New Physics processes. Most PDF analyses rely on the assumption that the charm and bottom PDFs are generated perturbatively by gluon splitting and do not include any non-perturbative degrees of freedom. However, a non-perturbative, intrinsic heavy quark PDFs have been predicted in the literature. 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, and use this approximation to model the intrinsic bottom distribution and its impact on parton-parton luminosities at the LHC.