Speaker
Description
Heavy-quark production inside jets provides a sensitive probe of parton shower evolution and flavor creation in QCD. In particular, constraining $g \to c\bar{c}$ and $g \to b\bar{b}$ splittings in pp collisions is important both for understanding heavy-flavor production in vacuum and for establishing a reference for future studies in heavy ion collisions, where long-distance gluon splitting into heavy-quark pairs is predicted to be enhanced by in-medium parton interactions. Muon-based tagging offers a clean, high-purity way to isolate double-heavy-flavor topologies inside jets, with particular sensitivity to collinear gluon-splitting configurations, and is well suited to both the pp environment and future high-multiplicity heavy-ion collisions.
In this contribution, CMS presents a study of double-muon-tagged jets in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=5.02$ TeV. The measurement probes dimuon observables sensitive to the kinematic structure of heavy-flavor production within jets. The selected sample is dominated by double-$b$ production, enabling a characterization of heavy-flavor jet topologies associated with gluon splitting. These results provide a new benchmark for heavy-flavor production in jets in pp collisions and establish a promising path toward future studies of heavy-quark production and its modification in nuclear collisions.