The Cross Section for the Production of Bottom Quark-Anti Bottom Quark Pairs in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at 1.8 Tev.

The cross section for the inclusive production of bb pairs in proton-antiproton collisions at a center -of-mass energy of 1.8 TeV, as measured by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) during the 1988-1989 experimental run, is presented. The production of bottom quark pairs is identified through the dual semileptonic decay mode, in which one quark produces an electron, and the other a muon. Background from cascade decays of single b quarks is removed by requiring the invariant mass of the e mu pair be greater than the mass of the b. The bb signal is separated statistically from the remaining physics background, cc production, by fitting the lepton P_sp{T}{rel} distributions with normalized distributions obtained from Monte Carlo simulations of b and c decays. The resulting cross section, expressed in terms of the b P_ {T} thresholds, is found to be a factor of two higher than the prediction of Quantum Chromodynamics.