Impact of heavy-flavour production cross sections measured by the LHCb experiment on parton distribution functions at low x

The impact of recent measurements of heavy-flavour production in deep inelastic $ep$ scattering and in $pp$ collisions on parton distribution functions is studied in a QCD analysis in the fixed-flavour number scheme at next-to-leading order. Differential cross sections of charm- and beauty-hadron production measured by LHCb are used together with inclusive and heavy-flavour production cross sections in deep inelastic scattering at HERA. The heavy-flavour data of the LHCb experiment impose additional constraints on the gluon and the sea-quark distributions at low partonic fractions $x$ of the proton momentum, down to $x sim 5 times 10^{-6}$. This kinematic range is currently not covered by other experimental data in perturbative QCD fits.

Review of Beauty Production at HERA and Elsewhere

Experimental results on beauty production at HERA are reviewed in the context of similar measurements at other colliders. As a result of a phenomenological study of the QCD scale dependence of many different NLO and NNLO predictions, a modification of the ``default scale choice is advocated. Experimental constraints on the photon-quark coupling are also investigated.