The impact of the LHCb B± production cross-section on parton distribution functions and determining the mass of heavy quarks

Abstract

In this work, the impact of recent measurements of heavy-flavour production in pp collisions on parton distribution functions (PDFs) and their uncertainties is studied. In this regard, the absolute and normalised cross sections of beauty hadron production measured by LHCb at center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and 13 TeV are separately included in the next-to-leading order (NLO) global QCD analysis together with the measurements of the inclusive and heavy-flavour production cross sections at HERA. It is illustrated that the heavy-flavour data of the LHCb experiment impose additional constraints on the PDFs, especially on the gluon distribution at low partonic fractions x of the proton momentum. One of the most important results of the present analysis is the significant reduction of the gluon uncertainties in the region less than x=10−4 that can play a crucial rule in many areas of high energy physics investigations.