Charm and beauty production at CDF.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - e x / 0 4 0 8 0 2 0 v 2 1 7 A u g 2 0 0 4 Proceedings of the DIS’2004, S?trbske? Pleso, Slovakia CHARM AND BEAUTY PRODUCTION AT CDF PETER J. BUSSEY FOR THE CDF COLLABORATION Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK E-mail: p.bussey@physics.gla.ac.uk A summary is presented of recent results from the CDF collaboration on the pro- duction of charm and beauty hadrons. 1 Introduction The Tevatron at Fermilab is at present the world’s highest energy particle accel- erator. After extensive refurbishments, data taking for Run II started in 2001, and by the end of 2003 over 200 pb?1 of usable integrated luminosity had been accumulated by each Collider experiment, double the total for Run I. In preparation for Run II, the CDF detector also underwent an extensive up- grade. Of special importance for the results presented here are the new Silicon Vertex Tracker, and a number of significant improvements to the trigger system. The Extremely Fast Tracker allows tracks in the central tracking system to be identified in the first-level trigger. In the second-level trigger, these tracks can be matched with tracking information from the SVT so as to identify events containing a displaced secondary vertex, by identifying tracks with a finite impact parameter relative to the beam line. The events are finally recorded after verification by the third-level trigger. In this talk, recent measurements and analyses of charm and beauty states using the CDF detector are presented. The emphasis here is on production mechanisms; studies of the decay and lifetime properties of such particles are given in other contributions to these Proceedings. 2 Theoretical framework Quantum Chromo-Dynamics is currently our most basic theory to describe the composition and production of hadrons. The study of particles containing c and b quarks provides important perspectives on our understanding of the application of this theory, because the heavy ma