The Physics of Heavy Quark Distributions in Hadrons: Collider Tests

Abstract

We present a review of the current understanding of the heavy quark distributions in the nucleon and their impact on collider physics. The origin of strange, charm and bottom quark pairs at high light-front (LF) momentum fractions in hadron wave functions---the "intrinsic" quarks, is reviewed. The determination of heavy-quark parton distribution functions (PDFs) is particularly significant for the analysis of hard processes at LHC energies. We show that a careful study of the inclusive production of open charm and the production of $\gamma$/$Z$/$W$ particles, accompanied by the heavy jets at large transverse momenta can give essential information on the intrinsic heavy quark (IQ) distributions. We also focus on the theoretical predictions concerning other observables which are very sensitive to the intrinsic charm contribution to PDFs including Higgs production at high xf and novel fixed target measurements which can be tested at the LHC.

74 pages, 31 figures. It is submitted and accepted for publishing in the journal "Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics"

References in corpus (7)

• Implications of CTEQ global analysis for collider observables
• The Charm Parton Content of the Nucleon
• Measurement of Parton Distributions of Strange Quarks in the Nucleon from Charged-Kaon Production in Deep-Inelastic Scattering on the Deuteron
• Direct Photon Production in Association With A Heavy Quark At Hadron Colliders
• Measurement of the differential photon+ c-jet cross section and the ratio of differential photon+ c and photon+ b cross sections in proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV
• Higgs Hadroproduction at Large Feynman x
• Prompt photon and associated heavy quark production at hadron colliders with kt-factorization

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Constraints on Gluon Distribution Functions in the Nucleon and Nucleus from Open Charm Hadron Production at the Electron-Ion Collider
• Parton distribution functions and constraints on the intrinsic charm content of the proton using BHPS approach
• Parton distribution functions and QCD coupling constant from LHC and non-LHC data