Intrinsic Bottom Research Articles

Intrinsic bottom and its impact on heavy new physics at the LHC

Heavy quark parton distribution functions (PDFs) play an important role in several Standard Model and New Physics processes. Most analyses rely on the assumption that the charm and bottom PDFs are generated perturbatively by gluon splitting and do not involve any non-perturbative degrees of freedom. On the other hand, non- perturbative, intrinsic heavy quark parton distributions have been predicted in the literature. We demonstrate that to a very good approximation the scale-evolution of the intrinsic heavy quark content of the nucleon is governed by non-singlet evolution equations. This allows to analyze the intrinsic heavy quark distributions without having to resort to a full-fledged global analysis of parton distribution functions. We exploit this freedom to model intrinsic bottom distributions which are so far missing in the literature. We estimate the impact of the non-perturbative contribution to the charm and bottom-quark PDFs and on several important parton-parton luminosities at the LHC.

Higgs hadroproduction at large Feynman x

We propose a novel mechanism for the production of the Higgs boson in inclusive hadronic collisions, which utilizes the presence of heavy quarks in the proton wave function. In these inclusive reactions the Higgs boson acquires the momenta of both the heavy quark and antiquark and thus carries 80% or more of the projectile's momentum. We predict that the cross section d σ / d x F ( p p ¯ → H X ) for the inclusive production of the Standard Model Higgs coming from intrinsic bottom Fock states is of order 150 fb at LHC energies, peaking in the region of x F ∼ 0.9 . Our estimates indicate that the corresponding cross section coming from gluon–gluon fusion at x F = 0.9 is relatively negligible and therefore the peak from intrinsic bottom should be clearly visible for experiments with forward detection capabilities. The predicted cross section for the production of the Standard Model Higgs coming from intrinsic heavy quark Fock states in the proton is sufficiently large that detection at the Tevatron and the LHC may be possible.

A NEW SEARCH STRATEGY FOR THE HIGGS BOSON

We propose a novel mechanism for exclusive diffractive Higgs production pp → Hpp, in which the Higgs carries a significant fraction of the projectile proton's momentum. This mechanism will then provide a clear experimental signal for Higgs production, due to the small background in this kinematic region. The key assumption underlying our analysis is the presence of intrinsic charm (IC) and intrinsic bottom (IB) fluctuations in the proton bound state, whose existence, at high light-cone momentum fraction x, has a substantial and growing experimental and theoretical support.