Transverse momentum spectra of inclusive b jets in pPb collisions at sqrt(sNN)=5.02 TeV

Abstract We present a measurement of b jet transverse momentum ( p T ) spectra in proton-lead (pPb) collisions using a dataset corresponding to about 35 nb − 1 collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Jets from b quark fragmentation are found by exploiting the long lifetime of hadrons containing a b quark through tagging methods using distributions of the secondary vertex mass and displacement. Extracted cross sections for b jets are scaled by the effective number of nucleon–nucleon collisions and are compared to a reference obtained from pythia simulations of pp collisions. The pythia -based estimate of the nuclear modification factor is found to be 1.22 ± 0.15 ( stat + syst pPb ) ± 0.27 (syst PYTHIA ) averaged over all jets with p T between 55 and 400 GeV / c and with | η lab | 2 . We also compare this result to predictions from models using perturbative calculations in quantum chromodynamics.