This Letter describes a measurement of the muon cross section originating from b quark decay in the forward rapidity range 2.4 < y(mu) < 3.2 in pbarp collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV. The data used in this analysis were collected by the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron. We find that NLO QCD calculations underestimate b quark production by a factor of four in the forward rapidity region. A cross section measurement using muon+jet data has been included in this version of the paper.
We present measurements of the b-bbar production cross section and angular correlations using the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron p-pbar Collider operating at sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV. The b quark production cross section for |y(b)|<1.0 and p_T(b)>6 GeV/c is extracted from single muon and dimuon data samples. The results agree in shape with the next-to-leading order QCD calculation of heavy flavor production but are greater than the central values of these predictions. The angular correlations between b and bbar quarks, measured from the azimuthal opening angle between their decay muons, also agree in shape with the next-to-leading order QCD prediction.