On the intrinsic bottom content of the nucleon and its impact on heavy new physics at the LHC

Abstract

Heavy quark parton distribution functions (PDFs) play an important role in several Standard Model and New Physics processes. Most analyses rely on the assumption that the charm and bottom PDFs are generated perturbatively by gluon splitting and do not involve any non-perturbative degrees of freedom. It is clearly necessary to test this hypothesis with suitable QCD processes. Conversely, a non-perturbative, intrinsic heavy quark parton distribution has been predicted in the literature. We demonstrate that to a very good approximation the scale-evolution of the intrinsic heavy quark content of the nucleon is governed by non-singlet evolution equations. This allows us to analyze the intrinsic heavy quark distributions without having to resort to a full-fledged global analysis of parton distribution functions. We exploit this freedom to model intrinsic bottom distributions which are so far missing in the literature in order to estimate the impact of this non-perturbative contribution to the bottom-quark PDF, and on parton--parton luminosities at the LHC. This technique can be applied to the case of intrinsic charm, albeit within the limitations outlined in the following.

23 pages, 11 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• A review of the intrinsic heavy quark content of the nucleon
• Double-quarkonium production at a fixed-target experiment at the LHC (AFTER@LHC)
• The impact of the intrinsic charm quark content of the proton on differential $\gamma +c$ cross section
• Probing proton intrinsic charm in photon or Z boson production accompanied by heavy jets at LHC
• Parton distribution functions and QCD coupling constant from LHC and non-LHC data