Cross section of D-mesons production via the c-quark fragmentation process at next-to-leading order accuracy in pp collisions at the 7TeV LHC

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the differential cross section of charmed mesons production ( $$D_{s}^{\pm }$$ D s ± , $$D^{0}$$ D 0 , $$D^{*}$$ D ∗ and $$D^{*\pm }$$ D ∗ ± and $$D^{\pm }$$ D ± ) are computed as a function of transverse momentum $$p_{T}$$ p T and the total cross sections. The hadronization mechanism is considered via a fragmentation process of a c heavy quark to a light-heavy meson according to Suzuki’s model. The two-cutoff phase-space slicing method has been applied to calculate the phase-space integral of two- and three-body subprocess cross sections and fragmentation function (FF) at next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy. By using Monte Carlo (MC) techniques, we try to properly estimate the ratio of neutral to charged D-meson production $$R_{u/d}$$ R u / d and the strangeness-suppression factor $$\gamma _{s}$$ γ s . Our numerical results show that the NLO corrections of the FF have significant effect on D-mesons production and enhance the cross section ratio at NLO respect to leading order (LO) about $$50\%$$ 50 % . A comparison indicates that our cross section results are in agreement (within uncertainties) with available data from ATLAS and ALICE and theoretical predictions of the fixed-order next-to-leading-logarithm (FONLL) approach and NLO parton-shower MC simulation (MC@NLO) in high-energy proton–proton (pp) collisions at $$\sqrt{s}=7TeV$$ s = 7 T e V .