Energy calibration of b-quark jets with Z → b(b)over-bar decays at the Tevatron collider

The energy measurement of jets produced by b-quarks at hadron colliders suffers from biases due to the peculiarities of the hadronization and decay of the originating B hadron. The impact of these effects can be estimated by reconstructing the mass of Z boson decays into pairs of b-quark jets. From a sample of 584pb(-1) of data collected by the CDF experiment in 1.96TeV proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron collider, we show how the Z signal can be identified and measured. Using the reconstructed mass of Z candidates we determine the energy calibration of b-quark jets with a precision better than 2%. This measurement allows a reduction of one of the dominant source of uncertainty in analyses based on high-transverse momentum b-quark jets. We also determine, as a cross-check of our analysis, the Z boson cross-section in hadronic collisions using the bb(-) final state as sigma(z) x B(Z -> b (b) over bar) = 1.58(-0.41)(+0.64) nb. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.