Non-perturbative bottom PDF and its possible impact on new physics searches
Abstract
Heavy quark parton distribution functions (PDFs) play an important role in several Standard Model and New Physics processes. Most PDF analyses rely on the assumption that the charm and bottom PDFs are generated perturbatively by gluon splitting and do not include any non-perturbative degrees of freedom. However, a non-perturbative, intrinsic heavy quark PDFs have been predicted in the literature. We demonstrate that to a very good approximation the scale-evolution of the intrinsic heavy quark content of the nucleon is governed by non-singlet evolution equations, and use this approximation to model the intrinsic bottom distribution and its impact on parton-parton luminosities at the LHC