Search for anomalous semileptonic decay of heavy flavor hadrons produced in association with a W boson at CDF II

TL;DR

This paper searches for unusual semileptonic decays of heavy flavor hadrons produced with a W boson in proton-antiproton collisions, finding no deviations from the standard model and setting limits on anomalous production.

Contribution

It introduces a novel search for anomalous semileptonic decays of heavy flavor hadrons associated with W bosons using Tevatron data, with no observed discrepancies.

Findings

No significant excess observed over standard model predictions

Set upper limits on anomalous heavy flavor production cross section

Validated the standard model expectations for heavy flavor decays

Abstract

We present a search for anomalous semileptonic decays of heavy flavor hadrons produced in association with a $W$ boson, in proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV. We use 162 pb-1 of data collected with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. We select events with one W boson and at least one jet with an identified secondary vertex. In the jets with a secondary vertex we look for a semileptonic decay to a muon. We compare the number of jets with both a secondary vertex and a semileptonic decay, and the kinematic properties of these jets, with the standard model expectation of W plus heavy flavor production and decay. No discrepancy is seen between the observation and the expectation, and we set limits on the production cross section of a B-like hadron with an anomalously high semileptonic branching ratio.