Production of at forward rapidity in collisions at GeV

Acharya, U.*; Hasegawa, Shoichi   ; Imai, Kenichi*; Nagamiya, Shoji*; Sako, Hiroyuki   ; Sato, Susumu  ; Tanida, Kiyoshi   ; PHENIX Collaboration*; 344 of others*

The cross section of bottom quark-antiquark () production in collisions at GeV is measured with the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The results are based on the yield of high mass, like-sign muon pairs measured within the PHENIX muon arm acceptance (). The signal is extracted from like-sign dimuons by utilizing the unique properties of neutral meson oscillation. We report a differential cross section of nb for like-sign muons in the rapidity and ranges and GeV/, and dimuon mass of 5 - 10 GeV/. The extrapolated total cross section at this energy for production is b. The total cross section is compared to a perturbative quantum chromodynamics calculation and is consistent within uncertainties. The azimuthal opening angle between muon pairs from decays and their distributions are compared to distributions generated using , which includes next-to-leading order processes. The azimuthal correlations and pair distribution are not very well described by calculations, but are still consistent within uncertainties. Flavor creation and flavor excitation subprocesses are favored over gluon splitting.