Isolated leptons from heavy flavor decays: Theory and data

Understand

Events with isolated leptons play a prominent role in signatures of new physics phenomena at high energy collider physics facilities.

• In earlier publications, we examine the standard model contribution to isolated lepton production from bottom and charm mesons and baryons through their semileptonic decays (b, c -> l + X), showing that this source can overwhelm the effects of other standard model processes in some kinematic domains.
• In this paper, we show that we obtain good agreement with recent Tevatron collider data, both validating our simulations and showing that we underestimate the magnitude of the heavy-flavor contribution to the isolated lepton yields.
• We also show that the isolation requirement acts as a narrow bandpass filter on the momentum of the isolated lepton, and we illustrate the effect of this filter on the background to Higgs boson observation in the dilepton mode.