New Measurements of Upsilon Spin Alignment at the Tevatron

Abstract

We describe a new analysis of Upsilon(nS) to mu+mu- decays collected in proton anti-proton collisions with the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron. This analysis measures the angular distributions of the final state muons in the Upsilon rest frame, providing new information about Upsilon production polarization. We find the angular distributions to be nearly isotropic up to Upsilon transverse momentum of 40 GeV/c, consistent with previous measurements by CDF, but inconsistent with results obtained by the D0 experiment. The results are compared with recent NLO calculations based on color-singlet matrix elements and non-relativistic QCD with color-octet matrix elements.