Nonphotonic electrons at RHIC within $k_t$-factorization approach and with experimental semileptonic decay functions

Abstract

We discuss production of nonphotonic electrons in proton-proton scattering at RHIC. The distributions in rapidity and transverse momentum of charm and bottom quarks/antiquarks are calculated in the $k_t$-factorization approach. We use different unintegrated gluon distributions from the literature. The hadronization of heavy quarks is done by means of Peterson and Braaten et al. fragmentation functions. The semileptonic decay functions are found by fitting recent semileptonic data obtained by the CLEO and BABAR collaborations. We get good description of the data at large transverse momenta of electrons and find a missing strength concentrated at small transverse momenta of electrons. Plausible missing mechanisms are discussed.

16 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Energy Loss and Flow of Heavy Quarks in Au+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV
• Measurement of high-p_T Single Electrons from Heavy-Flavor Decays in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV
• Charm Meson Decays
• Measurement of Single Muons at Forward Rapidity in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV and Implications for Charm Production
• A new correlation method to identify and separate charm and bottom production processes at RHIC
• The first measurement of $B$ meson semi-leptonic decay contribution to non-photonic electrons at RHIC