High-energy QCD dynamics from bottom flavor fragmentation at the Hi-Lumi LHC

We study the inclusive production of hadrons with bottom flavor at the LHC and its luminosity upgrade. We describe the collinear fragmentation of singly b-flavored hadrons, B mesons and Λb baryons, via the KKSS07 determination of fragmentation functions, while for charmed B mesons, Bc(1S0) and Bc(3S1) particles, we employ the novel ZCFW22 set, built on the basis of state-of-the-art nonrelativistic QCD inputs. We use the Jethad multimodular working environment to analyze rapidity and transverse-momentum distributions for observables sensitive to the associated emission of two hadrons or a hadron-plus-jet system. Our reference formalism is the NLL/NLO+ hybrid collinear and high-energy factorization, where the standard collinear description is improved by the inclusions of energy logarithms resummed up to the next-to-leading approximation and beyond. We provide corroborating evidence that b-flavor emissions act as fair stabilizers of the high-energy resummation, thus serving as valuable tools for precision studies of high-energy QCD. As a bonus, we highlight that the predicted production-rate hierarchy between noncharmed b-hadrons and charmed Bc(1S0) mesons is in line with recent LHCb estimates. This serves as simultaneous benchmark both for the hybrid factorization and for the single-parton fragmentation mechanism based on initial-scale inputs calculated via the nonrelativistic QCD effective theory.