Discriminating the heavy jet production mechanisms in associated $Z$ + heavy flavor events at the LHC

Abstract

We reconsider the associated $Z$ boson and charm or beauty jet production at the LHC with paying special attention to the formation dynamics of heavy jets. Two different approaches are studied: first one, where heavy quarks are produced in the hard scattering subprocesses, implemented in the Monte-Carlo generator PEGASUS, and another scenario, where the hard scattering is calculated at NLO with MadGraph5_aMC@NLO and TMD parton shower is included (implemented in the Monte-Carlo generator CASCADE3). We compare the predictions obtained in both schemes with latest experimental data for associated $Z+b$ production cross sections and the relative production rate $\sigma (Z+c)/\sigma (Z+b)$ collected by the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations at $\sqrt{s}=13$~TeV. We introduce two kinematic observables (denoted as $z_b$ and $p_T^{\mathrm{rel}}$) which can be used to discriminate the heavy jet production mechanisms. Using these variables we trace the shape of the simulated $b$-jet events and recommend that these observables be taken into consideration in the forthcoming experimental analyses.

11 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Azimuthal correlations of high transverse momentum jets at next-to-leading order in the parton branching method
• Probing the proton structure with associated vector boson and heavy flavor jet production at the LHC