Measurement of the B± Meson Nuclear Modification Factor in Pb-Pb Collisions at sNN =5.02 TeV

Abstract

© 2017 CERN, for the CMS Collaboration. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the «https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/» Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. The differential production cross sections of B± mesons are measured via the exclusive decay channels B±→J/ψK±→μ+μ-K± as a function of transverse momentum in pp and Pb-Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy sNN=5.02 TeV per nucleon pair with the CMS detector at the LHC. The pp(Pb-Pb) data set used for this analysis corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 28.0 pb-1 (351 μb-1). The measurement is performed in the B± meson transverse momentum range of 7 to 50 GeV/c, in the rapidity interval |y| < 2.4. In this kinematic range, a strong suppression of the production cross section by about a factor of 2 is observed in the Pb-Pb system in comparison to the expectation from pp reference data. These results are found to be roughly compatible with theoretical calculations incorporating beauty quark diffusion and energy loss in a quark-gluon plasma.