D-meson enhancement in pp collisions at the LHC due to nonlinear gluon evolution

A Dainese, R Vogt, M Bondila, K J Eskola, V J Kolhinen
2004 Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics  
When nonlinear effects on the gluon evolution are included with constraints from HERA, the gluon distribution in the free proton is enhanced at low momentum fractions, x < 0.01, and low scales, Q^2 < 10 GeV^2, relative to standard, DGLAP-evolved, gluon distributions. Consequently, such gluon distributions can enhance charm production in pp collisions at center of mass energy 14 TeV by up to a factor of five at midrapidity, y \sim 0, and transverse momentum p_T -> 0 in the most optimistic case.
more » ... e show that most of this enhancement survives hadronization into D mesons. Assuming the same enhancement at leading and next-to-leading order, we show that the D enhancement may be measured by D^0 reconstruction in the K^-\pi^+ decay channel with the ALICE detector.
doi:10.1088/0954-3899/30/12/002 fatcat:jw47og332zbudgpq3unjq5qcre