Observation potential for eta_b at the Tevatron

Abstract

We calculate the cross section for eta_b production at the Tevatron at next-to-leading order in the strong coupling and find that more than two millions of eta_b's are expected per inverse picobarn of integrated luminosity. We discuss the decay modes into charmed states and suggest that the decays into D* D(*) mesons might be the most promising channels to observe the eta_b in Run II.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Representative Feynman diagrams for $\eta_b$ hadro-production at LO (a), and virtual (b) and real (c) contributions at NLO.
• Figure 2: Differential cross sections for $\eta_b$ production at the Tevatron ($p\bar{p}$ at 1.96 TeV). The upper curve is normalized to the NLO total rate and describes the $p^T$ distribution for the $\eta_b$. The lower curve is the corresponding distribution for the $D$ mesons coming from the $\eta_b$ decays, after requiring that they both have $|\eta(D)|<1$ (no branching ratio included). After the acceptance cut, the rate drops to 15% of the total cross section.
• Figure 3: Representative Feynman diagrams for the $\eta_b$ inclusive decay into (a) two-charm (two diagrams) and (b) four-charm (four diagrams) states.