Is There a Significant Excess in Bottom Hadroproduction at the Tevatron?

TL;DR

It is shown that an accurate use of up-to-date information on the B fragmentation function reduces the observed excess to an acceptable level and possible implications for experimental results reporting bottom quark cross sections are discussed.

Abstract

We discuss the excess in the hadroproduction of B mesons at the Tevatron. We show that an accurate use of up-to-date information on the B fragmentation function reduces the observed excess to an acceptable level. Possible implications for experimental results reporting bottom quark cross sections, also showing an excess with respect to next-to-leading order theoretical predictions, are discussed.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Moments of the measured $B$ meson fragmentation function, compared with the perturbative NLL calculation supplemented with different $D(z)$ non-perturbative fragmentation forms. The solid line is obtained using a one-parameter form fitted to the second moment.
• Figure 2: Prediction for the $B$ cross section, obtained using the calculation of Ref. Cacciari:1998it supplemented with the $N=2$ fit of the non-perturbative fragmentation function, compared to the CDF data of Ref. Acosta:2001rz. For comparison, the result obtained using a Peterson form with $\epsilon=0.006$ is also shown.
• Figure 3: Data over Theory ratio for $B$ production. Data points and theoretical curves are as in Fig. \ref{['fig:Bhad']}
• Figure 4: The effect of the different ingredients in the calculation presented in this work, relative to a fixed order calculation with Peterson fragmentation and $\epsilon=0.006$.