Looking for intrinsic charm in the forward region at BNL RHIC and CERN LHC

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new mechanism using the Color Glass Condensate formalism to test for intrinsic charm in hadrons by analyzing D-meson production at forward rapidities in high-energy collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to detect intrinsic charm in hadrons through forward D-meson production spectra at RHIC and LHC.

Findings

Transverse momentum spectra depend on charm distribution at large Bjorken x.

Intrinsic charm hypothesis can be tested in proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions.

Results suggest a clear experimental signature for intrinsic charm detection.

Abstract

The complete understanding of the basic constituents of hadrons and the hadronic dynamics at high energies are two of the main challenges for the theory of strong interactions. In particular, the existence of intrinsic heavy quark components in the hadron wave function must be confirmed (or disproved). In this paper we propose a new mechanism for the production of $D$-mesons at forward rapidities based on the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) formalism and demonstrate that the resulting transverse momentum spectra are strongly dependent on the behavior of the charm distribution at large Bjorken $x$. Our results show clearly that the hypothesis of intrinsic charm can be tested in $pp$ and $p(d) A$ collisions at RHIC and LHC.