D-meson production from recombination in hadronic collisions

Abstract

Nonperturbative effects in D-meson production in pion-nucleon and proton-nucleon collisions are investigated within the recombination model. The coalescence of perturbatively created charm quarks with sea-and valence-quarks from projectile and target fragments is shown to be competitive in magnitude with standard fragmentation calculations at both central (small xF ) and forward rapidities. Corresponding flavor asymmetries for inclusive D-meson production are thus mostly generated on the (light-) parton distribution level, and turn out to be in reasonable overall agreement with available fixed-target data. Predictions for upcoming measurements at RHIC are given.

Heavy-quark probes of the quark-gluon plasma and interpretation of recent data taken at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

“…[15] based on earlier constructed light-quark spectra [37]. Quark coalescence has recently enjoyed considerable success in describing, e.g., the "partonic scaling" of elliptic flow and the large p/π ratio in Au-Au at RHIC [37][38][39], as well as flavor asymmetries in D-meson production in elementary hadronic collisions [40]. Whereas at low p T most of the HQs coalesce into D-and B-mesons, this is no longer the case at higher p T where the phase space density of light quarks rapidly decreases.…”

Quark coalescence and charm(onium) in QGP

“…This renders them excellent agents of the subsequently formed medium and their reinteractions within. The latter include: (a) coalescence with surrounding quarks as hadronization mechanism in addition to fragmentation, thereby probing the chemical and kinematic properties of the medium [2,3,4,5,6]; (b) energy loss of high-momentum Q-quarks [7,8], which, with increasing interaction strength toward lower momentum, eventually leads to (c) thermalization [9,10,11,12]; and, if the latter can be established, (d) in-medium dynamics of open and hidden heavy-flavor states [13,14,15,16,17], which is particularly exciting in view of recent QCD lattice calculations [18,19,20] indicating the survival of low-lying charmonia well into the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). In this paper we will address the above issues essentially in that order.…”

Gluon saturation and leading particle spectra in pp collisions

“…This mechanism works very well at low energies [17,18] and it is not clear that it will no longer work at higher energies. If this happens, then the individual valence quarks will undergo independent fragmentation and originate the leading baryons.…”