Ultraforward production of a charmed hadron plus a Higgs boson in unpolarized proton collisions

TL;DR

This paper explores the production of a charm hadron and a Higgs boson in unpolarized proton collisions at large rapidities, demonstrating the effectiveness of hybrid high-energy and collinear factorization in describing such processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of hybrid high-energy and collinear factorization to ultraforward charm-Higgs production, combining BFKL resummation with collinear densities and fragmentation functions.

Findings

Hybrid factorization describes the process well.

Cross sections and azimuthal correlations are analyzed.

Supports the use of this approach for ultraforward regimes.

Abstract

We investigate the inclusive emission in unpolarized proton collisions of a charm-flavored hadron in association with a Higgs boson, featuring large transverse momenta and produced with a large rapidity distance. Taking advantage of a narrow timing coincidence between the ATLAS detector and the future FPF ones, we study the behavior of cross sections and azimuthal correlations for ultraforward rapidities of the detected hadron. We provide evidence that the hybrid high-energy and collinear factorization, encoding the BFKL resummation of large energy logarithms and supplemented by collinear densities and fragmentation functions, offers a fair description of this process and comes out as an important tool to deepen our understanding of strong interactions in ultraforward production regimes.