Heavy-flavor particle correlations in STAR via electron azimuthal correlations with D^0 mesons

TL;DR

This paper reports the first measurement of heavy-flavor particle correlations in proton-proton collisions at RHIC, using electron-D0 meson azimuthal correlations to study charm and bottom quark production and their contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to statistically identify heavy-flavor events via azimuthal correlations and compares the results with theoretical event generators, providing new insights into heavy-flavor production mechanisms.

Findings

Gluon splitting contribution is small.

Bottom contribution to non-photonic electrons is about 50% at high pT.

First measurement of heavy-flavor correlations in STAR.

Abstract

We present first STAR measurement on two heavy-flavor particle correlations in $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV $p+p$ collisions at RHIC. Heavy-flavor (charm and bottom) events are identified and separated on a statistical basis through their characteristic decay topology using azimuthal correlation of non-photonic electrons and reconstructed open charmed mesons. The results are compared to simulations from PYTHIA and MC@NLO event generators. The gluon splitting contribution is found to be small. The relative bottom contribution to the non-photonic electrons is $\sim50%$ at $\pT > 5.5$ GeV/c.