Open charm hadroproduction and the intrinsic charm content of the proton

TL;DR

This paper explores how inclusive production of charmed hadrons in hadron collisions can reveal the presence and characteristics of intrinsic charm within protons, using next-to-leading order calculations and existing experimental data.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of hadron collider data to probe intrinsic charm in the proton, employing a comprehensive theoretical framework and recent fragmentation function data.

Findings

Tevatron data shows sensitivity to intrinsic charm models.

RHIC data could discriminate between different intrinsic charm models at high transverse momentum.

The study supports using charmed-hadron production as a probe for intrinsic charm in protons.

Abstract

We advocate charmed-hadron inclusive hadroproduction as a laboratory to probe intrinsic charm (IC) inside the colliding hadrons. Working at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme endowed with non-perturbative fragmentation functions recently extracted from a global fit to e^+e^- annihilation data from KEKB, CESR, and LEP1, we first assess the sensitivity of Tevatron data of D^0, D^+, and D^{*+} inclusive production to the IC parameterizations provided by Pumplin et al. We then argue that similar data from pp collisions at RHIC would have the potential to discriminate between different IC models provided they reach out to sufficiently large values of transverse momentum.