Revisiting the D-meson hadroproduction in general-mass variable flavour number scheme

TL;DR

This paper presents a new approach to modeling D-meson production in high-energy collisions, improving the description at low transverse momentum and achieving good agreement with LHC data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel implementation of the general-mass variable flavor number scheme at NLO, addressing the small-transverse-momentum challenge in heavy-flavour hadroproduction.

Findings

Accurately describes D-meson production across all transverse momenta.

Achieves excellent agreement with LHCb and ALICE data.

Provides a framework compatible with other theoretical models.

Abstract

We introduce a novel realization of the open heavy-flavour hadroproduction in general-mass variable flavour number scheme at next-to-leading order in perturbative QCD. The principal novelty with respect to the earlier works is in the treatment of small-transverse-momentum limit, which has been a particularly challenging kinematic region in the past. We show that by a suitable choice of scheme, it is possible to obtain a well-behaved description of the open heavy-flavour hadroproduction cross sections from zero up to asymptotically high transverse momentum. We contrast our calculation with the available D$^0$-meson data as measured by the LHCb and ALICE collaborations at the LHC, finding a very good agreement within the theoretical and experimental uncertainties. We also compare our framework with other theoretical approaches.