Study of B Meson Production in p + Pb Collisions at √s_NN = 5.02 TeV Using Exclusive Hadronic Decays

The production cross sections of the B⁺, B⁰, and B⁰_s mesons, and of their charge conjugates, are measured via exclusive hadronic decays in p + Pb collisions at the center-of-mass energy √s_NN = 5.02 TeV with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. The data set used for this analysis corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 34.6 nb⁻¹. The production cross sections are measured in the transverse momentum range between 10 and 60 GeV/c. No significant modification is observed compared to proton-proton perturbative QCD calculations scaled by the number of incoherent nucleon-nucleon collisions. These results provide a baseline for the study of in-medium b quark energy loss in Pb + Pb collisions.