The asymmetric intrinsic charm in the nucleon and its implications for the $D^{0}$ production in the LHCb $p\!+\!\!^{20}\!N\!e$ fixed-target experiment

TL;DR

This paper investigates how asymmetric intrinsic charm in the proton affects $D^0$ meson production in fixed-target collisions at LHCb, revealing that current models improve data description but need refinement for certain asymmetries.

Contribution

It introduces models of asymmetric intrinsic charm and assesses their impact on $D$ meson production, highlighting limitations in current descriptions of $D^0$-${ar D}^0$ asymmetry.

Findings

Intrinsic charm improves the description of $D$ meson rapidity and transverse momentum distributions.

Current models cannot fully explain the $D^0$-${ar D}^0$ asymmetry at high transverse momentum.

Refinements are needed in intrinsic charm modeling or additional effects must be considered.

Abstract

Recent results indicate that charm quarks are intrinsic components of the proton wave function, and that the charm and anticharm distributions for a given value of the Bjorken - $x$ variable can be different. In this paper, we will investigate the impact of this asymmetric intrinsic charm on the production of $D^0$ and ${\bar D}^0$ mesons for fixed target $p \!+ ^{20}\!\!Ne$ collisions at the LHCb. In our calculations, we include the contribution of the gluon-gluon fusion, gluon - charm and recombination processes and assume distinct models for the treatment of the intrinsic charm component. We demonstrate that the presence of an intrinsic charm improves the description of the current data for the rapidity and transverse momentum distributions of $D$ mesons. However, such models are not able to describe the LHCb data for the $D^0$-${\bar D}^0$ asymmetry at large transverse momentum, which point out that the description of the intrinsic charm needs to be improved and/or new effects should be taken into account in the production of heavy mesons at forward rapidities in fixed - target collisions.