Is there a significant excess in bottom production?

by Matteo CACCIARI (University of Parma)

Friday 26 Jul 2002, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Auditorium (CERN)

For quite a long time experiments have generally reported an apparent excess in the observed production of heavy quarks. This is particularly true for bottom production in collider experiments, where excesses up to a factor of four with respect to theoretical predictions are found and have even fuelled 'beyond the Standard Model' interpretations. We critically reexamine the ingredients that enter both the theoretical predictions and the experimental determinations. The issue of making proper use of available information about fragmentation effects in QCD turns out to be a crucial one. We argue that some of the most striking discrepancies can be strongly reduced, down to an acceptable level, by a theoretically careful implementation of perturbative resummation and non-perturbative fragmentation.