Measurement of Single Muons at Forward Rapidity in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV and Implications for Charm Production

Abstract

Muon production at forward rapidity (1.5 < |η| < 1.8) has been measured by the PHENIX experiment over the transverse momentum range 1 < p_T \le 3 GeV/c in sqrt(s) = 200 GeV p+p collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. After statistically subtracting contributions from light hadron decays an excess remains which is attributed to the semileptonic decays of hadrons carrying heavy flavor, i.e. charm quarks or, at high p_T, bottom quarks. The resulting muon spectrum from heavy flavor decays is compared to PYTHIA and a next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculation. PYTHIA is used to determine the charm quark spectrum that would produce the observed muon excess. The corresponding differential cross section for charm quark production at forward rapidity is determined to be dσ_(c c^bar)/dy|_(y=1.6)=0.243 +/- 0.013 (stat.) +/- 0.105 (data syst.) ^(+0.049)_(-0.087) (PYTHIA syst.) mb.

329 authors, pages text, 18 figures, tables. Submitted to Physical Review D. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html

References in corpus (3)

• Measurement of high-p_T Single Electrons from Heavy-Flavor Decays in p+p Collisions at sqrt(s) = 200 GeV
• Forward Neutral Pion Production in p+p and d+Au Collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV
• Open Heavy Flavor Production in p+p, d+Au and Au+Au Collisions at $\sqrt{(}s)=200$ GeV

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