Paper of the Week
Measurement of the Forward-Backward Asymmetry in the Production of B± Mesons in pp¯ Collisions at s^1/2 = 1.96 TeV
Physics Letters B 114, 1803, 2015
P. Baringer*, A. Bean*, G. Chen*, J. Clutter*, J. Sekaric*, G. W. Wilson* et al. (D0 Collaboration)
* KU Physics and Astronomy Authors
We present a measurement of the forward-backward asymmetry in the production of B± mesons, AFB(B±), using B±-->J /psi K± decays in 10.4 fb-1 of pp ¯ collisions at s^1/2=1.96 TeV collected by the D0 experiment during Run II of the Tevatron collider. A nonzero asymmetry would indicate a preference for a particular flavor, i.e., b quark or b ¯ antiquark, to be produced in the direction of the proton beam. We extract AFB(B±) from a maximum likelihood fit to the difference between the numbers of forward- and backward-produced B± mesons. We measure an asymmetry consistent with zero: AFB(B±)=[-0.24 ±0.41 (stat )±0.19 (syst )]% .