Beauty-quark and charm-quark pair production asymmetries at LHCb

The LHCb Collaboration has recently performed a first measurement of the angular production asymmetry in the distribution of beauty quarks and antiquarks at a hadron collider. We calculate the corresponding standard model prediction for this asymmetry at fixed order in perturbation theory. Our results show good agreement with the data, which are provided differentially for three bins in the invariant mass of the bb¯ system. We also present similar predictions for both beauty-quark and charm-quark final states within the LHCb acceptance for a collision energy of s=13TeV. We finally point out that a measurement of the ratio of the bb¯ and cc¯ cross sections may be useful for experimentally validating charm-tagging efficiencies.