Phenomenological implications of the intrinsic charm in the $Z$ boson production at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates how intrinsic charm in the proton affects Z boson production and related processes at the LHC, proposing specific ratios as probes for intrinsic charm detection.

Contribution

It introduces analysis of intrinsic charm effects on Z-related processes and proposes ratio observables as new probes for intrinsic charm at the LHC.

Findings

Z+c production is highly sensitive to intrinsic charm.

Ratios R(Z+c/Z) and R(Z+c/Z+jet) can effectively probe intrinsic charm.

Intrinsic charm significantly alters the rapidity and transverse momentum distributions.

Abstract

In this paper we study the $Z$, $Z+$ jet, $Z+c$ and $Z+c+$ jet production in $pp$ collisions at the LHC considering different models for an intrinsic charm content of the proton. We analyse the impact of the intrinsic charm in the rapidity and transverse momentum distributions for these different processes. Our results indicated that differently from the other processes, the $Z+c$ cross section is strongly affected by the presence of the intrinsic charm. Moreover, we propose the analysis of the ratios $R(Z+c/Z) \equiv \sigma(Z+c)/\sigma(Z)$ and $R(Z+c/Z+\mbox{jet}) \equiv \sigma(Z+c)/\sigma(Z+\mbox{jet})$ and demonstrate that these observables can be used as a probe of the intrinsic charm.