D meson production asymmetry, unfavoured fragmentation and consequences for prompt atmospheric neutrino production

Abstract

We consider unfavoured light quark/antiquark to $D$ meson fragmentation. We discuss nonperturbative effects for small transverse momenta. The asymmetry for $D^{+}$ and $D^{-}$ production measured by the LHCb collaboration provides natural constraints on the parton (quark/antiquark) fragmentation functions. We find that already a fraction of $q/\bar{q}\to D$ fragmentation probability is sufficient to account for the measured asymmetry. We make predictions for similar asymmetry for neutral $D$ mesons. Large $D$-meson production asymmetries are found for large $x_F$ which is related to dominance of light quark/antiquark $q/\bar{q}\to D$ fragmentation over the standard $c\to D$ fragmentation. As a consequence, prompt atmospheric neutrino flux at high neutrino energies can be much larger than for the conventional $c\to D$ fragmentation. The latter can constitute a sizeable background for the cosmic neutrinos claimed to be observed recently by the IceCube Observatory. Large rapidity-dependent $D^{+}/D^{-}$ and $D^0/{\bar{D}}^0$ asymmetries are predicted for low ($\sqrt{s}=$ 20 - 100 GeV) energies. The $q/\bar{q}\to D$ fragmentation leads to enhanced production of $D$ mesons at low energies. At $\sqrt{s}$ = 20 GeV the enhancement factor with respect to the conventional contribution is larger than a factor of five. In the considered picture the large-$x_F$ $D$ mesons are produced dominantly via fragmentation of light quarks/antiquarks. Predictions for fixed target $p{+}^4\text{He}$ collisions relevant for a fixed target LHCb experiment are presented.

20 pages, 12 figures, The initial calculations were improved by modifying fragmentation algorithm and using two different fragmenatation functions

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• Intrinsic charm in the nucleon and charm production at large rapidities in collinear, hybrid and $k_T$-factorization approaches
• Prompt neutrinos and intrinsic charm at SHiP
• Independent quark/antiquark fragmentation to massive particles in proton-proton collisions
• Impact of intrinsic charm amount in the nucleon and saturation effects on the prompt atmospheric ${\nu }_{\mu }$ flux for IceCube
• Recombination mechanism for $D^0$-meson production and $D^0-\overline{D^0}$ production asymmetry in the LHCb $p+{}^{20}Ne$ fixed-target experiment
• From $D_s^{\pm }$ production asymmetry at the LHC to prompt ${\nu }_{\tau }$ at IceCube
• Production asymmetry of ${\nu }_{\tau }$ neutrinos and ${\overline{\nu }}_{\tau }$ antineutrinos from a fixed target experiment SHiP
• Elliptic flow and $R_{AA}$ of D mesons at FAIR comparing the UrQMD hybrid model and the coarse-graining approach
• A new parton fragmentation procedure for heavy hadron production in proton-proton collisions
• New vistas in charm production
• Measurements of charmed meson and antimeson production asymmetries at $\sqrt{s}=13.6$ TeV