Refined measurement of the<i>B</i>-hadron lifetime

Abstract

We report a new measurement of the average lifetime of hadrons containing bottom quarks. The B-hadron decays are tagged by identifying leptons at high transverse momentum. From a fit to the lepton impact-parameter distribution, the average B-hadron lifetime is found to be (0.98\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.12\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.13)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}${10}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}12}$ sec.