English

D meson enhancement in pp collisions at the LHC due to nonlinear gluon evolution

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2014-11-17 v2 Nuclear Theory

Abstract

When nonlinear effects on the gluon evolution are included with constraints from HERA, the gluon distribution in the free proton is enhanced at low momentum fractions, x < 0.01, and low scales, Q^2 < 10 GeV^2, relative to standard, DGLAP-evolved, gluon distributions. Consequently, such gluon distributions can enhance charm production in pp collisions at center of mass energy 14 TeV by up to a factor of five at midrapidity, y \sim 0, and transverse momentum p_T -> 0 in the most optimistic case. We show that most of this enhancement survives hadronization into D mesons. Assuming the same enhancement at leading and next-to-leading order, we show that the D enhancement may be measured by D^0 reconstruction in the K^-\pi^+ decay channel with the ALICE detector.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-ph/0403098,
  title  = {D meson enhancement in pp collisions at the LHC due to nonlinear gluon evolution},
  author = {A. Dainese and R. Vogt and M. Bondila and K. J. Eskola and V. J. Kolhinen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-ph/0403098},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

15 pages, 4 figures, final version accepted by J. Phys. G