Probing the strong interaction between charm hadrons and charged particles with femtoscopy measurements with ALICE

TL;DR

This paper uses femtoscopy measurements with ALICE to study the strong interactions between charm hadrons and light-flavor hadrons, providing new insights into Quantum Chromodynamics and exotic charm states at high-energy proton-proton collisions.

Contribution

It presents the first femtoscopy measurements of charm hadron interactions with light hadrons, including correlation functions and residual interactions in pp collisions at 13 TeV.

Findings

Correlation functions for D mesons and light hadrons are measured.

Residual strong interactions between charm hadrons and light hadrons are characterized.

New data on $ m \Lambda_{c}^+$ and protons correlations are analyzed.

Abstract

Studies of strong interactions between hadrons provide a valuable opportunity to test Quantum Chromodynamics at nucleon-scale distances. The femtoscopy technique has proven to be an effective tool for studying interactions between unstable hadrons by measuring the correlation function of hadron pairs in momentum space. While several measurements of the strong interactions between light and strange hadrons have been conducted using this technique, studies of charm hadrons have been limited. These studies can shed light on the formation of exotic charm states or, in the case of baryons, nuclei with charm content. In these proceedings, measurements of the strong interaction between charm hadrons and light-flavor hadrons using the femtoscopy technique are presented. The final results on the correlation functions and residual strong interactions between $\rm D$ mesons and light hadrons measured in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV are discussed. Additionally, new studies of correlations between $\Lambda_{\rm c}^+$ and protons in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV, utilizing the new data samples collected from LHC Run 3, are presented.