Date of Award

8-7-2018

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Advisor

Xiaochun He and Murad Sarsour

Second Advisor

Megan Connors

Third Advisor

Steven Manson

Fourth Advisor

Russel White

Abstract

Heavy flavor quarks are an important probe of the initial state of the Quark Gluon Plasma formed in heavy-ion collisions. Bottom and charm quarks are produced early in the collision, primarily through hard interactions, and experience the full time evolution of the medium. Understanding bottom quark production in proton-proton collisions gives a baseline reference for studying larger collision systems. The measurement of the b-quark production ∆φ correlations gives insight into the b-quark production mechanisms.

The signal can be isolated by taking advantage of the properties of neutral B meson oscillations in the invariant mass region of 5-10 GeV. Measuring like-sign dimuons within this mass range provides an enriched bottom signal with a minimal amount of open charm background and without any contributions from quarkonia or Drell-Yan pairs. b-quark production will be measured through the semi-leptonic decay like-sign dimuon signal, in the rapidity range 1.2 < |y| < 2.2 and at √s = 510 GeV from data recorded in 2013 at the PHENIX experiment. The measured total cross section is 14.9 ± 0.7(stat) ± 2.0(type B sys.) ± 3.4(type C sys.)[μb].

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/12520056

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