# Quark Matter 2012

12-18 August 2012
US/Eastern timezone

## Study of $b\bar{b}$ production using correlated like-sign dimuons at PHENIX

16 Aug 2012, 16:00
2h

Poster Heavy flavor and quarkonium production

Laura Patel

### Description

Production of open bottom (B) mesons is an important tool to probe the hot and dense matter created from nucleus-nucleus collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). In the mass region between 4.5 and 12 GeV, the only source of correlated like-sign dimuons will come from the semileptonic decay of B meson pairs. The number of correlated like-sign dimuons due to neutral B meson oscillation is directly related to the total number of open bottom meson pairs and thus can provide a way of constraining the open bottom contribution to the dimuon continuum in the high mass region. To establish this new analysis method, correlated like-sign dimuons from pairs of B mesons of $\sim$6.3 pb$^{-1}$ data from p+p collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 500 GeV within the PHENIX muon arms acceptance (1.2 < |y| < 2.2) were studied. Results from this study will be presented. In the future, this analysis method can be applied to the $\sqrt{s}$ = 200 GeV p+p collisions in order to determine a baseline for d+Au and Au+Au collision systems to study the modiﬁcation of heavy flavor production in a deconﬁned medium.

### Presentation Materials

There are no materials yet.