Bottom hadro-chemistry in high-energy hadronic collisions

Abstract

The hadro-chemistry of bottom quarks ($b$) produced in hadronic collisions encodes valuable information on the mechanism of color-neutralization in these reactions. Since the $b$-quark mass is much larger than the typical hadronic scale of $\sim$1\,GeV, $b\bar b$ pair production is expected to be well separated from subsequent hadronization processes. A significantly larger fraction of $b$ baryons has been observed in proton-proton ($pp$) and proton-antiproton ($p\bar{p}$) reactions relative to $e^+e^-$ collisions, challenging theoretical descriptions. We address this problem by employing a statistical hadronization approach with an augmented set of $b$-hadron states beyond currently measured ones, guided by the relativistic quark model and lattice-QCD computations. Assuming {\it relative} chemical equilibrium between different $b$-hadron yields, thermal densities are used as fragmentation weights of $b$-quarks into various hadron species. With quark model estimates of the decay patterns of excited states, the fragmentation fractions of weakly-decaying $b$ hadrons are computed and found to agree with measurements in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at the Tevatron. By combining transverse-momentum ($p_T$) distributions of $b$-quarks from perturbative QCD with thermal weights and independent fragmentation toward high $p_T$, a fair description of the $p_T$-dependent $\bar{B}_s^0/B^-$ and $\Lambda_b^0/B^-$ ratios measured in $pp$ collisions at the LHC is obtained. Finally, we implement the hadro-chemistry into a strongly-coupled transport approach for $b$-quarks in heavy-ion collisions, utilizing previously determined $b$-quark transport coefficients in the Quark-Gluon Plasma, to highlight the modifications of hadro-chemistry and collective behavior of $b$ hadrons in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC.