Charm particle production in hadronic collisions.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 0 3 0 7 3 5 8 v 3 2 1 D e c 2 0 0 6 Charm particle production in hadronic collisions C. Avila1)?, J. Magnin1,2)?, L.M. Mendoza-Navas1)? 1) Departamento de F??sica, Universidad de los Andes A.A. 4976, Santafe? de Bogota?, Colombia 2) Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas F??sicas Rua Dr. Xavier Sigaud 150, Urca, CEP 22290-180, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil February 1, 2008 Abstract We study charm particle production in hadron-hadron collisions. After cal- culating perturbatively the charm quark differential cross section, we study the hadronization mechanisms. It is shown that recombination is the key to understand the so called Leading Particle Effect in charm meson production. For charm baryon production, however, leading particle effects are due to a combination of contributions coming from both, the recombination and the fragmentation mechanisms. We compare our calculations to experimental data on charm hadron production in π? N and p N interactions from several exper- iments and show that a consistent description of them can be reached without the aid of other mechanism than recombination and fragmentation. ?cavila@uniandes.edu.co ?jmagnin@cbpf.br ?luismi@fnal.gov 1 1 Introduction Heavy quark production in hadronic collisions is one of the most interesting testing grounds of Quantum Chromodinamics. The fusion reactions g g → Q Q? and q q? → Q Q? are expected to be dominant in heavy quark, Q, production and, as a matter of fact experimental data seems to reasonably agree with perturbative QCD (pQCD) calculations which today are available up to Next to Leading Order (NLO) [1]. Once a heavy quark is produced, it has to hadronize to produce the observed, hadronic, final state. On this respect, it was expected that the factorization the- orem be valid and hadronization proceeded through the fragmentation mechanism. Thus, heavy hadron production can be separated into the perturbatively calculable hard scattering and gluon dynamics from the non-perturb