Open Charm Production in pp and Heavy Ion Collisions in QCD.pdf

a r X i v : 0 7 0 7 .0 9 4 6 v 1 [ h e p - p h ] 6 J u l 2 0 0 7 OPEN CHARM PRODUCTION IN pp AND HEAVY ION COLLISIONS IN QCD C. Merino, C. Pajares, and Yu. M. Shabelski? Departamento de F??sica de Part??culas, Facultade de Fisica, and Instituto Gallego de Altas Energias (IGAE), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, E-15706-Santiago de Compostela, Spain ? Permanent address: Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, Gatchina, St.Petersburg 188350 Russia Abstract The RHIC data on charm production are compared with the kT -factorization approach predictions, both standard NLO QCD and FONLL. The calculated re- sults underestimate the STAR Collaboration data. The role of possible nuclear effects is discussed. PACS numbers: 25.75.Dw, 13.87.Ce, 24.85.+p The investigation of heavy quark production in high energy collisions is an impor- tant method for studing the quark-gluon structure of hadrons and the possible nuclear effects at early stages of secondary production. The description of hard interactions in hadron collisions within the framework of QCD is possible only with the help of some phenomenological assumptions which reduce the hadron–hadron interaction to the parton–parton one via the formalism of the hadron structure functions. The cross sec- tions of hard processes in hadron–hadron interactions can be written as the convolutions of squared matrix elements of the subprocess calculated within the framework of QCD with the parton distributions in the colliding hadrons. The most popular phenomenological approach is the NLO QCD collinear approxima- tion [1-4], where the cross sections of QCD subprocesses are calculated in the Next-to- Leading Order (NLO) of αs series. The Fixed Order plus Next-to-Leading-Log (FONLL) [5] also resumes large perturbative terms proportional to αns log k(pT/m) with k = n, n?1, where m is the heavy quark mass. In these calculations all particles involved are assumed to be on mass shell, carrying only longitudinal momenta, and the cross