2025/04/25 by Neelkamal Mallick, Mallick, Neelkamal, Hadi Hassan +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.18279
openalex publication_date 2025/04/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Studies of heavy-quark (charm and beauty) production in hadronic and nuclear collisions provide excellent testing grounds for the theory of strong interaction, quantum chromodynamics. Heavy-quarks are produced predominantly in the initial hard partonic interactions, allowing them to witness the entire evolution process. The charm hadrons are produced in two ways. Firstly, the prompt charm hadrons which are formed from the charm quark hadronization which are produced directly from the initial hard-scatterings or the decay of other excited charm states. Secondly, the nonprompt charm hadrons which are produced from the decay of beauty hadrons. The produced charm hadrons then usually decay to light-flavor hadrons or leptons via two or three body decay. The reconstruction of charm hadrons is challenging due to the large combinatorial background as well as the difficulty of distinguishing between prompt and non-prompt charm hadrons. In this work, we use machine learning models--XGboost and Deep Neural Network--to reconstruct Λc+ (udc) hadrons via its three body final state decay channel, Λc+ → pK0s and K0s → π+π-. Using several experimentally available features of the decay daughters, these models can separate signal from background and identify prompt and nonprompt candidates with nearly 99% accuracy. This method performs an unbinned track-level reconstruction since the Λc candidates are tagged directly from their decay daughters. The necessary data for this study are simulated in pp collisions at √(s)=13.6~TeV using PYTHIA8 (Monash) model.