Measurement of the Cross Section for open b-Quark Production in Two-Photon Interactions at LEP

Inclusive beauty-quark production in two-photon collisions has been measured at LEP using an integrated luminosity of 698 pb-1 collected by the ALEPH detector with sqrt(s) between 130 and 209 GeV. The b quarks were identified using lifetime information. The cross section is found to be sigma(e+ e- --> e+ e- b ar{b} X) = (5.4 +/- 0.8 (stat) +/- 0.8 (syst)) pb which is consistent with Next-to-Leading Order QCD.