B-meson hadroproduction in the SACOT-mT scheme

A bstract We apply the SACOT- m T general-mass variable flavour number scheme (GM-VFNS) to the inclusive B-meson production in hadronic collisions at next-to-leading order in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics. In the GM-VFNS approach one matches the fixed-order heavy-quark production cross sections, accurate at low transverse momentum ( p T ), with the zero-mass cross sections, accurate at high p T . The physics idea of the SACOT- m T scheme is to do this by accounting for the finite momentum transfer required to create a heavy quark-antiquark pair throughout the calculation. We compare our results with the latest LHC data from proton-proton and proton-lead collisions finding a very good agreement within the estimated theoretical uncertainties. We discuss also scheme-related differences and their impact on the scale uncertainties.