Unified framework for heavy flavor and quarkonium production in high multiplicity p+p and p+A collisions at RHIC and LHC

TL;DR

This paper presents a unified CGC-based framework explaining how high multiplicity events in p+p and p+A collisions at RHIC and LHC lead to enhanced heavy flavor and quarkonium production due to increased gluon saturation, with energy-independent predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a unified CGC-based model that links high multiplicity events to gluon saturation effects in heavy flavor and quarkonium production, providing energy-independent predictions across collider energies.

Findings

High multiplicity events show increased gluon saturation scales.

The model explains the enhancement of D-mesons and J/psi yields.

Predictions are energy independent from RHIC to LHC energies.

Abstract

We discuss the production of $D$-mesons and $J/\psi$ in high multiplicity proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions within the Color-Glass-Condensate (CGC) framework. We demonstrate that the modification of the LHC data on $D$ and $J/\psi$ yields in high multiplicity events relative to minimum bias events arise from a significant enhancement of the gluon saturation scales of the corresponding rare parton configurations in the colliding protons and nuclei. For a given event multiplicity, we predict these relative yields to be energy independent from $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV at RHIC to the highest LHC energies.