Strong and Weak Production of Beauty and Charm at the CERN Proton-Antiproton Collider.

Beauty and charm production has been studied in proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt{ rm s} = 630 GeV with the UA1 detector at the CERN collider. Clear evidence for strong production of b- and c-quarks has been obtained. The feasibility of observing hadronic decays of the W and Z intermediate vector bosons in the channels W to cs, Z to cc, bb was investigated. Beauty and charm were identifed from their semileptonic decays by the presence of a muon in or near a jet. The analysis was performed on a sample of 20,000 muon trigger events containing jets in which the reconstructed muon has a transverse momentum greater than 6 GeV/c. This muon p_{rm T} threshold was necessary to reduce the background to prompt muons from K^{+/-} and pi^{+/-} decays within the detector. The integrated luminosity of the sample was 573 nb^{-1}. The detailed kinematics of the muon-jet events are in excellent agreement with the predictions of QCD for beauty and charm strong production. The QCD expectations were calculated with the ISAJET Monte Carlo in conjunction with a full simulation of the UA1 detector. The Monte Carlo predicts the number of events observed. The inclusive cross sections for heavy quark production with p _{rm T}(Q) > 12 GeV/c, |eta{rm (Q) }| < 2 thus measured are 1.4 mub for charm and 0.5 mub for beauty. Higher order (2 to 3) processes account for about two thirds of the heavy quark cross section in this kinematic range. No evidence for W/Z to c/b was observed in the invariant mass distribution of the jet-jet-mu-nu system. The mass resolution achieved was +/- 20%. The measured strong beauty and charm cross sections imply a signal to noise ratio of 1/50 for standard model W and Z cross sections. Observing these decays will be difficult at hadron colliders.