Measurement of electrons from beauty hadron decays in pp collisions at √s=7 TeV

Abstract

The production cross section of electrons from semileptonic decays of beauty hadrons was measured at mid-rapidity (vertical bar y vertical bar < 0.8) in, the transverse momentum range 1 < p(T) < 8 GeV/c with the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC in pp collisions at a center of mass energy root s = 7 TeV using an integrated luminosity of 2.2 nb(-1). Electrons from beauty hadron decays were selected based on the displacement of the decay vertex from the collision vertex. A perturbative QCD calculation agrees with the measurement within uncertainties. The data were extrapolated to the full phase space to determine the total cross section for the production of beauty quark-antiquark pairs. (C) 2013 CERN. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.