Beauty-quark and charm-quark pair production asymmetries at LHCb

Abstract

The LHCb collaboration has recently performed a first measurement of the angular production asymmetry in the distribution of beauty quarks and anti-quarks at a hadron collider. We calculate the corresponding standard model prediction for this asymmetry at fixed-order in perturbation theory. Our results show good agreement with the data, which is provided differentially for three bins in the invariant mass of the $b\bar{b}$ system. We also present similar predictions for both beauty-quark and charm-quark final states within the LHCb acceptance for a collision energy of $\sqrt{s}=13\mathrm{TeV}$. We finally point out that a measurement of the ratio of the $b\bar{b}$ and $c\bar{c}$ cross sections may be useful for experimentally validating charm-tagging efficiencies.

4.5 pages + references, 1 figure, 4 tables