Independent quark/antiquark fragmentation to massive particles in proton-proton collisions

Abstract

We critically discuss fragmentation of quark or antiquark to massive particles (mesons or baryons) in proton-proton collisions. Both heavy and light quark/antiquark fragmentations are discussed using universal $z$-dependent fragmentation functions. Different scenarios how to define the $z$ variable are considered: as a fraction of energy, momentum or light-cone momentum of the parent quark/antiquark. Also a choice of the direction of motion of hadron with respect to the parent parton must be made in the simplest approach. Energy and flavour violation is discussed for the region of small $p_t$ and/or center-of-mass $y\sim$ 0. Results of different approaches are compared. We show that at the LHC energies all schemes become consistent for $D$-meson transverse momenta larger than $2$ GeV. Relations to results from the literature are made. We present some examples for production of D mesons from light and charm quarks/antiquarks. Emission with respect to the direction of motion lowers the cross section of $D$ mesons at larger rapidities compared to the traditional approach ($y_D=y_{q/\bar{q}}$). As illustrated here the effect of using different prescriptions is particularly large at low energies (fixed target experiments).

18 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (5)

• An Introduction to PYTHIA 8.2
• Charmed-Meson Fragmentation Functions with Finite-Mass Corrections
• A determination of the fragmentation functions of pions, kaons, and protons with faithful uncertainties
• Measurement of the D+/- production asymmetry in 7 TeV pp collisions
• Open charm production in the parton Reggeization approach: from Tevatron to LHC

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• Recombination mechanism for $D^0$-meson production and $D^0-\overline{D^0}$ production asymmetry in the LHCb $p+{}^{20}Ne$ fixed-target experiment
• Production asymmetry of ${\nu }_{\tau }$ neutrinos and ${\overline{\nu }}_{\tau }$ antineutrinos from a fixed target experiment SHiP
• QCD predictions for open charm meson production at the LHCb in fixed-target experiment
• Production of forward heavy-flavour dijets at the LHCb within $k_T$-factorization approach
• A new parton fragmentation procedure for heavy hadron production in proton-proton collisions
• Local energy-momentum conservation and initial conditions for quark-gluon plasma evolution in nucleus-nucleus collisions at SPS and RHIC BES energies