Measuring the Parton Distribution Functions of charm, beauty and strange quarks and antiquarks at the LHC

Possibilities to measure parton distribution functions and luminosities of charm, beauty and strange quarks and antiquarks at the LHC are investigated, using events with an isolated high pt photon and exactly one jet which contains an inclusive muon. These events originate predominantely from the scattering processes c g -> gamma c and b g -> gamma b. Furthermore, events with an isolated high pt lepton and one jet which contains an inclusive muon produced from the reaction s g -> W c -> lepton nu and a jet which contains a muon are used to determine the strange quark parton distribution function. The study demonstrates that the charm, beauty and strange quark and antiquark parton distribution functions can be measured with unprecedented statistical accuracy for an x range between about 0.0005 and about 0.1-0.2 and a Q2=(Mass)2 > (100 GeV)2}. Systematic uncertainties fr om the charm fragmentation function and the semileptonic charm decay branching fractions will limit the possible accuracy of such a measurement to perhaps +-5--10%, which nevertheless will drastically improve any pre LHC measurements of heavy flavor parton distribution functions. The study described in this note was performed in the context of the 1999 CERN LHC workshop