Heavy flavor properties of jets produced in $p\bar{p}$ interactions at $sqrt{s}=$ 1.8 TeV

TL;DR

This paper analyzes heavy flavor jet properties at the Fermilab Tevatron, using data and simulations to explore discrepancies in bottom quark production rates and the origin of heavy flavor content in jets.

Contribution

It provides a tuned Monte Carlo simulation that matches observed secondary-vertex rates and offers insights into the heavy flavor production discrepancy at the Tevatron.

Findings

The simulation reproduces secondary-vertex rates within uncertainties.

The observed rate of soft leptons in away-jets exceeds expectations.

Discrepancies suggest additional sources of heavy flavor or production mechanisms.

Abstract

We present a detailed examination of the heavy flavor properties of jets produced at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The data set, collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, consists of events with two or more jets with transverse energy $E_T \geq 15$ GeV and pseudo-rapidity $|\eta| \leq 1.5$. The heavy flavor content of the data set is enriched by requiring that at least one of the jets (lepton-jet) contains a lepton with transverse momentum larger than 8 GeV/c. Jets containing hadrons with heavy flavor are selected via the identification of secondary vertices. The parton-level cross sections predicted by the {\sc herwig} Monte Carlo generator program are tuned within theoretical and experimental uncertainties to reproduce the secondary-vertex rates in the data. The tuned simulation provides new information on the origin of the discrepancy between the $b\bar{b}$ cross section measurements at the Tevatron and the next-to-leading order QCD prediction. We also compare the rate of away-jets (jets recoiling against the lepton-jet) containing a soft lepton ($p_T \geq 2$ GeV/c) in the data to that in the tuned simulation. We find that this rate is larger than what is expected for the conventional production and semileptonic decay of pairs of hadrons with heavy flavor.