Probing heavy-flavor parton distribution functions at hadron colliders

Keping Xie, Marco Guzzi, Pavel Nadolsky

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arXiv
2203.06207
Date
2022-03-11
Frontier
Energy Frontier (EF)
Topical groups
Submitted by
Keping Xie

Abstract

Precision measurements of heavy-flavor hadroproduction at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have the ability to probe heavy-flavor parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the proton. Sensitivity of inclusive B± meson production cross section measurements at LHCb 13 TeV to the bottom-quark PDF is illustrated by using theory predictions obtained with a the S-ACOT-MPS general mass variable flavor number (GMVFN) scheme within the QCD factorization formula. This approach can easily be extended to other heavy-flavor production processes, such as Z boson production in association with a bottom- or a charm-jet. The inclusion of such measurements will represent an important improvement for future global QCD analyses that aim at reducing uncertainties of heavy-flavor PDFs, provided that a consistent general mass treatment in pp collisions is used. This work is related to the activities of the Snowmass topic groups EF03, and EF06.