Heavy quark pair production in high energy pA collisions: Open heavy flavors

TL;DR

This paper investigates open heavy flavor meson production in proton-nucleus collisions at RHIC and LHC energies using the Color Glass Condensate framework, focusing on gluon saturation effects and azimuthal correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of heavy meson production incorporating small-x gluon distributions with running coupling corrections and compares different initial saturation models.

Findings

Transverse momentum spectra for D and B mesons in pA collisions.

Nuclear modification factors indicating saturation effects.

Azimuthal correlations showing gluon saturation influence.

Abstract

We study open heavy flavor meson production in proton-nucleus (pA) collisions at RHIC and LHC energies within the Color Glass Condensate framework. We use the unintegrated gluon distribution at small Bjorken's x in the proton obtained by solving the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation with running coupling correction and constrained by global fitting of HERA data. We change the initial saturation scale of the gluon distribution for the heavy nucleus. The gluon distribution with McLerran-Venugopalan model initial condition is also used for comparison. We present transverse momentum spectra of single D and B productions in pA collisions, and the so-called nuclear modification factor. The azimuthal angle correlation of open heavy flavor meson pair is also computed to study the modification due to the gluon saturation in the heavy nucleus at the LHC.