Measurement of Beauty Production at HERA Using Events with Muons and Jets

TL;DR

This paper reports a measurement of beauty quark production cross sections at HERA, using events with jets and muons, and compares the results with perturbative QCD predictions, finding some discrepancies.

Contribution

First measurement of beauty production cross sections in ep collisions at HERA using muon and jet events, with detailed comparison to QCD calculations.

Findings

Measured cross sections in photoproduction and DIS

Predictions are somewhat lower than observed data

Provides insights into heavy quark production mechanisms

Abstract

A measurement of the beauty production cross section in ep collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 319 GeV is presented. The data were collected with the H1 detector at the HERA collider in the years 1999-2000. Events are selected by requiring the presence of jets and muons in the final state. Both the long lifetime and the large mass of b-flavoured hadrons are exploited to identify events containing beauty quarks. Differential cross sections are measured in photoproduction, with photon virtualities Q^2 < 1 GeV^2, and in deep inelastic scattering, where 2 < Q^2 < 100 GeV^2. The results are compared with perturbative QCD calculations to leading and next-to-leading order. The predictions are found to be somewhat lower than the data.