Looking for intrinsic charm in the forward region at BNL RHIC and CERN LHC

Abstract

The complete understanding of the basic constituents of hadrons and the hadronic dynamics at high energies are two of the main challenges for the theory of strong interactions. In particular, the existence of intrinsic heavy quark components in the hadron wave function must be confirmed (or disproved). In this paper we propose a new mechanism for the production of $D$-mesons at forward rapidities based on the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) formalism and demonstrate that the resulting transverse momentum spectra are strongly dependent on the behavior of the charm distribution at large Bjorken $x$. Our results show clearly that the hypothesis of intrinsic charm can be tested in $pp$ and $p(d)A$ collisions at RHIC and LHC.

22 pages, 5 figures. Version to be published in Nuclear Physics A

References in corpus (15)

• Parton Distributions for LO Generators
• Heavy Quark Mass Effects in Deep Inelastic Scattering and Global QCD Analysis
• The Charm Parton Content of the Nucleon
• Quark pair production in high energy pA collisions: General features
• Geometric scaling violations in the central rapidity region of d+Au collisions at RHIC
• Charmed-Hadron Fragmentation Functions from CERN LEP1 Revisited
• Small x Phenomenology - summary of the 3rd Lund Small x Workshop in 2004
• Geometric Scaling at RHIC and LHC
• Open charm hadroproduction and the charm content of the proton
• Diffractive Higgs Production from Intrinsic Heavy Flavors in the Proton
• Production of q bar-q Pairs in Proton-Nucleus Collisions at High Energies
• Geometric Scaling from GLAP evolution
• Forward hadron production in high energy pA collisions: from RHIC to LHC
• Hadron and Photon Production in the Forward Region at RHIC and LHC
• Heavy flavor production in pA collisions

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Phenomenology of nonperturbative charm in the nucleon
• Searching for intrinsic charm in the proton at the LHC
• Intrinsic charm contribution to the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux
• Intrinsic charm in the nucleon and charm production at large rapidities in collinear, hybrid and $k_T$-factorization approaches
• Phenomenological implications of the intrinsic charm in the $Z$ boson production at the LHC
• Intrinsic charm content of the nucleon and charmness-nucleon sigma term
• Forward heavy flavour production in p-p collisions at LHC and intrinsic quark components in proton
• $D$ - meson production at very forward rapidities: estimating the intrinsic charm contribution
• Constraints on Gluon Distribution Functions in the Nucleon and Nucleus from Open Charm Hadron Production at the Electron-Ion Collider
• The Physics of Heavy Quark Distributions in Hadrons: Collider Tests
• On the energy dependence of the D^+/D^- production asymmetry
• Heavy quark production in deep inelastic electron-nucleus scattering
• Charmed meson production based on dipole transverse momentum representation in high energy hadron-hadron collisions available at the LHC
• $D$-meson production in high energy $pA$ collisions within the QCD color dipole transverse momentum representation
• Photon plus heavy quark production in high energy collisions within the target rest frame formalism
• About possible contribution of intrinsic charm component to inclusive spectra of charmed mesons
• Nucleon structure and hard p-p processes at high energies
• Physics of high energy atmospheric muons