A preliminary measurement of the gluon splitting rate into $b\bar{b}$ pairs in hadronic $Z^0$ decays

TL;DR

This paper reports a preliminary measurement of the gluon splitting rate into bottom quark pairs in hadronic Z^0 decays, using a vertex mass tagging technique on 4-jet events collected by SLD between 1996 and 1998.

Contribution

It introduces a novel measurement of the gluon splitting rate into bottom quarks in Z^0 decays using a topological vertex mass tagging method.

Findings

Measured rate of g → bar{b} as (3.07 ± 0.71 (stat.) ± 0.66 (syst.))×10^{-3}

First application of vertex mass technique for this measurement in hadronic Z^0 decays

Results are preliminary and contribute to understanding of QCD processes in Z^0 decays.

Abstract

We present a measurement of the rate of gluon splitting into bottom quarks, $g \to b\bar{b}$, in hadronic $Z^0$ decays collected by SLD from 1996 to 1998. The analysis was performed by looking for secondary bottom production in 4-jet events of any primary flavor. A topological vertex mass technique was used to tag the two jets with the smallest angle between them as $b/\bar{b}$. We obtained a rate of $g \to b\bar{b}$ per hadronic event to be $(3.07 \pm 0.71 {\rm (stat.)} \pm 0.66 {\rm (syst.)})\times 10^{-3}$ (preliminary).