Impact of heavy-flavour production cross sections measured by the LHCb experiment on parton distribution functions at low x
- Resource Type
- Working Paper
- Authors
- Zenaiev, Oleksandr; Geiser, Achim; Lipka, Katerina; Blümlein, Johannes; Cooper-Sarkar, Amanda; Garzelli, Maria-Vittoria; Guzzi, Marco; Kuprash, Oleg; Moch, Sven-Olaf; Nadolsky, Pavel; Placakyte, Ringaile; Rabbertz, Klaus; Schienbein, Ingo; Starovoitov, Pavel
- Source
- Subject
- High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
High Energy Physics - Experiment
- Language
The impact of recent measurements of heavy-flavour production in deep inelastic $ep$ scattering and in $pp$ collisions on parton distribution functions is studied in a QCD analysis in the fixed-flavour number scheme at next-to-leading order. Differential cross sections of charm- and beauty-hadron production measured by LHCb are used together with inclusive and heavy-flavour production cross sections in deep inelastic scattering at HERA. The heavy-flavour data of the LHCb experiment impose additional constraints on the gluon and the sea-quark distributions at low partonic fractions $x$ of the proton momentum, down to $x \sim 5 \times 10^{-6}$. This kinematic range is currently not covered by other experimental data in perturbative QCD fits.