Heavy quarks in proton-nucleus collisions - the hybrid formalism

TL;DR

This paper investigates the effects of heavy quark masses on inclusive hadron production in high-energy proton-nucleus collisions using the hybrid formalism, combining collinear factorization and high-density resummation.

Contribution

It presents the first calculations of heavy-flavor hadron production and heavy-quark contributions to light hadron production within the hybrid formalism at leading and next-to-leading order.

Findings

Computed single inclusive cross-section for heavy-flavor hadrons.

Calculated heavy-quark contributions to light hadron production.

Demonstrated the applicability of the hybrid formalism to heavy quark effects.

Abstract

We explore the quark mass effects on inclusive hadron production in proton-nucleus collisions at high energies. We consider two processes. First, we compute the single inclusive cross-section for production of hadrons with open heavy flavour in the proton forward direction at leading order. Next, in the same kinematics, we calculate the heavy-quark contribution to single inclusive production of light or unidentified hadrons at next-to-leading-order. For both studies we exploit the hybrid formalism, that is the collinear factorisation on the proton side while high-density and high-energy effects are resummed on the side of the nucleus.