First measurement of the charge asymmetry in beauty-quark pair production.

The difference in the angular distributions between beauty quarks and antiquarks, referred to as the charge asymmetry, is measured for the first time in b[bar over b] pair production at a hadron collider. The data used correspond to an integrated luminosity of 1.0  fb[superscript −1] collected at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy in proton-proton collisions with the LHCb detector. The measurement is performed in three regions of the invariant mass of the b[bar over b] system. The results obtained are A[b[bar over b] over C](40 105  GeV/c[superscript 2]) = 1.6 ± 1.7 ± 0.6%, where A[b[bar over b] over C] is defined as the asymmetry in the difference in rapidity between jets formed from the beauty q…