Nucleon structure and hard p-p processes at high energies

TL;DR

This paper investigates how heavy flavor hadron production in high-energy proton-proton collisions can reveal intrinsic heavy quark components in the proton, providing predictions for experiments like NA61 and LHC.

Contribution

It introduces a method to identify processes sensitive to intrinsic heavy quarks and provides perturbative QCD predictions including intrinsic strangeness and charm.

Findings

Certain parton-level processes are most sensitive to intrinsic heavy quarks.

Predictions made for heavy flavor production can be tested at NA61 and LHC.

Intrinsic heavy quark contributions can significantly affect heavy hadron yields.

Abstract

The production of heavy flavour hadrons in $pp$ collisions at large values of their transverse momenta can be a new unique source for estimation of intrinsic heavy quark contribution to the proton. We analyze the inclusive production of the open strangeness and the semi-inclusive hard processes of the photon and vector boson production accompanied by the $c$- or $b$-jets in $pp$ collisions. We show that one should select the parton-level (sub)processes (and final-state signatures) that are the most sensitive to the intrinsic heavy quark contributions. We present some predictions for these processes made within the perturbative QCD including the intrinsic strangeness and intrinsic charm in the proton that can be verified in the NA61 experiment and at LHC.