Charm and beauty production at LHC

Abstract

This note will be part of Chapter 6.5 of the ALICE Physics Performance Report (PPR), "ALICE Physics: Charm and Beauty", where the capabilities of ALICE for the detection of open heavy flavour particles will be described. We define here the present ALICE baseline for what concerns the heavy flavour production cross sections at LHC and the kinematical distributions of the heavy quark pairs. We start by qualitatively assessing the Bjorken x regimes accessible with charm and beauty measurements at LHC with ALICE (Section 1). In Section 2 we report the most recent results (and the uncertainties) of the next-to-leading order (NLO) pQCD calculations for the cross sections in pp collisions at LHC energies. These results are extrapolated to Pb-Pb collisions in Section 3.1 and to p-Pb collisions in Section 3.2, taking into account nuclear shadowing and parton intrinsic transverse momentum broadening.Heavy quark kinematics as given by the NLO pQCD calculation are reported in Section 4. We tuned the PYTHIA event generator in order to reproduce such results for what concerns the c and b quarks transverse momentum distributions (Section 5). Finally, we report the yields and transverse momentum distributions for D and B mesons (Section 6).

ALICE Collaboration Note, 24 pages, 18 figures

References in corpus (4)

• HERWIG 6.5: an event generator for Hadron Emission Reactions With Interfering Gluons (including supersymmetric processes)
• High-Energy-Physics Event Generation with PYTHIA 6.1
• The A Dependence of Open Charm and Bottom Production
• Hard probes in heavy ion collisions at the LHC: heavy flavour physics

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Heavy flavour production in ALICE
• Measuring beauty production in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC via single electrons in ALICE
• $D\overline{D}$ momentum correlations versus relative azimuth as a sensitive probe for thermalization
• Heavy Flavours in Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC: ALICE Performance
• Detection of D^0 mesons via hadronic decays in Pb-Pb collisions at LHC with ALICE
• Open heavy flavour production in ALICE
• Charm production and energy loss at the LHC with ALICE