Heavy Quark Production and Decay: t, b, and onia

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent experimental results on heavy quark production and decay, highlighting progress in top quark measurements, b-quark processes, and charmonium production, with comparisons to Standard Model predictions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive summary of recent experimental measurements and their agreement or discrepancies with theoretical models for heavy quark phenomena.

Findings

Top quark mass measured with less than 3% uncertainty.

B->s gamma decay rate consistent with Standard Model.

Discrepancies observed between theory and experiment in b-quark production cross sections.

Abstract

This paper summarizes a variety of recent results on heavy quark production and decay. Considerable progress has been made by CDF and D0 in measuring top quark production and decay properties. The top quark mass been measured with an uncertainty that is less than 3%, a relative precision that is better than has been achieved for other quarks. Measurements of the top production and decay properties are consistent with the Standard Model predictions, but are generally limited in precision by the small number of top quark events in the present data samples. ALEPH and CLEO have measured the branching ratio for the flavor changing neutral current decay b->s gamma and find good agreement with the Standard Model. Measurements of b-quark production cross sections in ppbar collisions by CDF and D0 and in ep collisions by H1 continue to show discrepancies between theory and experiment. CDF and DELPHI have measured the b-quark fragmentation fractions with better accuracy than previous measurements. Finally, measurements of charmonium production by D0, E771, and L3 are consistent with predictions of the color octet model.