Measurement of the b-quark fragmentation function in Z0 decays

We present a measurement of the b-quark inclusive fragmentation function in Z0 decays using a novel kinematic B-hadron energy reconstruction technique. The measurement was performed using 350 000 hadronic Z0 events recorded in the SLD experiment at SLAC between 1997 and 1998. The small and stable SLC beam spot and the charge-coupled-device–based vertex detector were used to reconstruct B-decay vertices with high efficiency and purity, and to provide precise measurements of the kinematic quantities used in this technique. We measured the B energy with good efficiency and resolution over the full kinematic range. We compared the scaled B-hadron energy distribution with models of b-quark fragmentation and with several ad hoc functional forms. A number of models and functions are excluded by the data. The average scaled energy of weakly decaying B hadrons was measured to be 〈xb〉=0.709±0.003(stat)±0.003(syst)±0.002(model).