Heavy baryons as polarimeters at colliders

Mario Galanti, Andrea Giammanco, Yuval Grossman, Yevgeny Kats, Emmanuel Stamou, Jure Zupan

Published 2015-05-11Version 1

In new-physics processes that produce b or c jets, a measurement of the initial b or c-quark polarization could provide crucial information about the structure of new physics. In the heavy-quark limit, the b and c-quark polarizations are preserved in the lightest baryons they hadronize into, Lambda_b and Lambda_c, respectively. We revisit the prediction for the polarization retention after the hadronization process and extend it to the case of transverse polarization. We show how ATLAS and CMS can measure the b-quark polarization using semileptonic Lambda_b decays, and the c-quark polarization using Lambda_c+ -> p K- pi+ decays. For calibrating both measurements we suggest to use ttbar samples in which the polarizations can be measured with a precision of order 10% using 100/fb of data in Run 2 of the LHC. LHCb measurements of the transverse polarization in QCD events are motivated as well. An existing LHCb analysis can be significantly improved for this purpose.