The cross section of bottom quark-antiquark ($b\overline{b}$) production in $p+p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=510\mathrm{GeV}$ 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 ($1.2<|y|<2.2$). The $b\overline{b}$ signal is extracted from like-sign dimuons by utilizing the unique properties of neutral $B$ meson oscillation. We report a differential cross section of $d{\sigma }_{b\overline{b}\to {\mu }^{\pm }{\mu }^{\pm }}/dy=0.16\pm 0.01(\mathrm{stat})\pm 0.02(\mathrm{syst})\pm 0.02(\text{global})\mathrm{nb}$ for like-sign muons in the rapidity and $p_T$ ranges $1.2<|y|<2.2$ and $p_T>1\mathrm{GeV}/c$, and dimuon mass of $5–10\mathrm{GeV}/c^2$. The extrapolated total cross section at this energy for $b\overline{b}$ production is $13.1\pm 0.6(\mathrm{stat})\pm 1.5(\mathrm{syst})\pm 2.7(\text{global})\mu \mathrm{b}$. 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 $b\overline{b}$ decays and their $p_T$ distributions are compared to distributions generated using ps pythia6, which includes next-to-leading order processes. The azimuthal correlations and pair $p_T$ distribution are not very well described by pythia calculations, but are still consistent within uncertainties. Flavor creation and flavor excitation subprocesses are favored over gluon splitting.

• Received 2 June 2020
• Accepted 28 September 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.092002

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Published by the American Physical Society