Associated production of a $W$-boson and a charm meson at NNLO in QCD

TL;DR

This paper presents the first NNLO differential predictions for W-boson and charm meson production in proton-proton collisions, comparing them with experimental data and exploring implications for proton structure.

Contribution

It provides the first NNLO calculations for W-charm associated production and demonstrates their potential for improving parton distribution functions.

Findings

NNLO predictions agree well with ATLAS data

Sensitivity to strange quark content in the proton is demonstrated

Results support including W-charm data in PDF fits

Abstract

The production of heavy-flavor hadrons in association with a vector boson in proton-proton collisions is a powerful probe for studying Quantum Chromodynamics and the content of protons. In this article, we provide, for the first time, differential predictions through NNLO for the production of $W^{\pm}D^{(*)\mp}$ final states. The results are compared to recent ATLAS measurements, and the sensitivity to the strange content of the proton is investigated by PDF profiling. The results are found to be promising for including $W^{\pm}D^{(*)\mp}$ measurements in proton-proton collisions in PDF fits.