Ruling out exotic models of b quark decay

Observation and study of bottom-meson decays to a charm meson, a proton-antiproton pair, and pions

“…This section provides a guide to the most pertinent facts, tables, and figures of this Dissertation, which presents the branching fractions and kinematic distributions for ten baryonic B decays (with first observations of the latter six modes): 5 Modes with D Modes with D * 3-body decays B 0 →D 0 pp B 0 →D * 0 pp 4-body decays B…”

“…A thermionic cathode "gun" produces unpolarized e − , which are accelerated to 1.1 GeV and fed into the damping rings after sector 1, where a combination of synchrotron radiation and applied fields reduce their transverse motions. Sectors 2-8 accelerate the e − to 9 GeV, where the first two out of every three bunches 5 are diverted to a bypass for PEP-II injection; the third is accelerated to 30 GeV, where at sector 19, they bombard a tungsten-rhenium alloy target yielding about one 10 MeV e + per incident e − . After filtering out the debris produced in the pairproduction process, the e + are sent back to sector 1 where they join and follow the e − bunch.…”

“…4 Minimizing and scanning the nll determines the set of values and errors, respectively, for {Ω α , N α }. 5 The error determination can be understood in the context of a large number of measurements, i. e., for large N the likelihood function of a parameter, say, the first one in the category a (ω a,1 ), is gaussian in the vicinity of the maximum L max :…”

“…and N 0 N are omitted because they are computationally irrelevant. 5 Our implementation using the Minuit fitting package [132] finds asymmetric Minos errors.…”

“…Grand unification theories without the top quark predicted [3,4] that "open-bottom" states, i. e., states where the bottom quark is accompanied by a light antiquark such as B mesons, will decay predominantly to final states with baryons. Although such scenarios were quickly ruled out [5] in the 1980s, they served as an instigator for the program of studying such decays.…”