Open charm hadroproduction and the charm content of the proton

Abstract

We advocate charmed-hadron inclusive hadroproduction as a laboratory to probe intrinsic charm (IC) inside the colliding hadrons. Working at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme endowed with non-perturbative fragmentation functions recently extracted from a global fit to e^+e^- annihilation data from KEKB, CESR, and LEP1, we first assess the sensitivity of Tevatron data of D^0, D^+, and D^{*+} inclusive production to the IC parameterizations provided by Pumplin et al. We then argue that similar data from pp collisions at RHIC would have the potential to discriminate between different IC models provided they reach out to sufficiently large values of transverse momentum.

22 pages, 7 figures; discussion of large-p_T range at the Tevatron and high-energy mode of RHIC included, 2 figures added; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D

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• Measurement of high-p_T Single Electrons from Heavy-Flavor Decays in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV
• Charmed-Meson Fragmentation Functions with Finite-Mass Corrections
• The Charm Parton Content of the Nucleon
• Comparison of Inclusive Charm and Beauty Cross Sections in Deep-inelastic Scattering at HERA with Theoretical Predictions

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Charm Production and QCD Analysis at HERA and LHC
• Inclusive D*-meson production in ep scattering at low Q2 in the GM-VFN scheme at NLO