The impact of the LHCb $B^{\pm}$ production cross-section on parton distribution functions and determining the mass of heavy quarks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how recent LHCb measurements of heavy-flavour production influence parton distribution functions, notably reducing gluon uncertainties at very low momentum fractions, which enhances the precision of high-energy physics predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive NLO global QCD analysis incorporating LHCb heavy-flavour data, significantly constraining gluon PDFs at low x values.

Findings

Heavy-flavour data constrains gluon PDFs at low x

Gluon uncertainties are significantly reduced below x=10^{-4}

Enhanced precision in high-energy physics predictions

Abstract

In this work, the impact of recent measurements of heavy-flavour production in $pp$ collisions on parton distribution functions (PDFs) and their uncertainties is studied. In this regard, the absolute and normalised cross sections of beauty hadron production measured by LHCb at center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and 13 TeV are separately included in the next-to-leading order (NLO) global QCD analysis together with the measurements of the inclusive and heavy-flavour production cross sections at HERA. It is illustrated that the heavy-flavour data of the LHCb experiment impose additional constraints on the PDFs, especially on the gluon distribution at low partonic fractions $x$ of the proton momentum. One of the most important results of the present analysis is the significant reduction of the gluon uncertainties in the region less than $x=10^{-4}$ that can play a crucial rule in many areas of high energy physics investigations.