Double D-meson production in proton-proton and proton-lead collisions at the LHC

Abstract

We consider the simultaneous production of two heavy-flavoured hadrons -particularly D mesons -at the LHC. We base our calculations on collinearly factorized QCD at next-to-leading order, using the contemporary parton distribution functions and Dmeson fragmentation functions. The contributions of double-parton scatterings are included in the approximation of independent partonic interactions. Our framework benchmarks well with the available proton-proton data from the LHCb collaboration giving us confidence to make predictions for proton-lead collisions. Our results indicate that the double D-meson production in proton-lead collisions should be measurable at the LHCb kinematics with the already collected Run-II data, and should provide evidence for double-parton scattering at perturbative scales with a nuclear target.

A QCD analysis of LHCb D-meson data in p+Pb collisions

“…[65,74], this framework is in a very good agreement with the ALICE [50,74] and LHCb [39][40][41] data for inclusive D-meson production in p+p collisions in a broad rapidity range. The GM-VFNS approach also broadly reproduces the LHCb data on double D-meson production [76].…”

Saturation and forward jets in proton-lead collisions at the LHC

“…The nuclear suppression is found to be significant in the region where CASTOR data are available, reaching down to R pA ≈ 0.5 at smallest-energy bins. At E 1 TeV contributions from more than one merged jets becomes important and R pA eventually becomes larger than unity, thanks to the likely multi-parton scatterings [85][86][87][88][89]. Fig.…”

Probing impact-parameter dependent nuclear parton densities from double parton scatterings in heavy-ion collisions

“…(1) and (2) in Ref. [102]], which, however, does not take into account the spatially dependent initial nuclear modifications. Moreover, if we set g i N A (x) = g i N (x) (i.e., zero nuclear modification), we have g i N A ,1 (x) = g i N A ,2 (x) = g i N (x).…”

“…In turn, the DPS cross sections in heavy-ion collisions can provide useful information on the spatial dependence of nPDFs. They can be, in general, obtained in minimum-bias nuclear collisions, featuring the virtue of independence of Glauber modeling.1 To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing DPS phenomenological applications in heavy-ion collisions [89][90][91][92][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104] considers such an effect. 2 There are also a few attempts to obtain the spatial form of the nPDFs based on phenomenological models (see, e.g., ).…”