Revisiting the $B^{(*)}_{s}$-meson production at the hadronic colliders

Abstract

The hadronic production of the heavy-flavored hadron provides a challenging opportunity to test the validity of pQCD predictions. In the paper, we make a comparative study on the properties of the $B^{(*)}_{s}$ hadroproduction within either the fixed-flavor-number scheme (FFNS) or the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNS). By using FFNS, as is previously adopted in the literature, one only needs to deal with the dominant gluon–gluon fusion mechanism via the subprocess $g+g\rightarrow B^{(*)}_{s}+b+\bar{s}$. While by using GM-VFNS, one needs to deal with two mechanisms: one is the gluon–gluon fusion mechanism and the other is the extrinsic heavy quark mechanism via the subprocesses $g+\bar{b}\to B^{(*)}_{s} +\bar{s}$ and $g+s\to B^{(*)}_{s} +b$. It is found that both mechanisms can provide reasonable contributions to the $B^{(*)}_{s}$ hadroproduction under the GM-VFNS, and there is double counting for those two mechanisms in specific kinematic regions. At the Tevatron, the differences between the estimations of FFNS and GM-VFNS are small, e.g. after cutting off the small p _T events (cf. p _T >4 GeV), the $B^{(*)}_{s}$ p _T -distributions are almost coincide with each other. However, these differences are obvious at the LHC. The forthcoming more precise data on LHC shall provide a good chance to check which scheme is more appropriate to deal with the $B^{(*)}_{s}$-meson production and to further study the heavy quark components in hadrons.