Inclusive open charm photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC with GγA-FONLL

2025/06/11 by Cacciari, Matteo, Innocenti, Gian Michele, Staśto, Anna M.
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.09893

Abstract

We compute the inclusive D⁰ production cross section in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC as a function of the D⁰ transverse momentum and rapidity. These calculations are carried out within the new GγA-FONLL (Generalized Photon-Nucleus FONLL) framework, which can predict photonuclear cross sections for charm and beauty hadrons in electron-proton, electron-nucleus, and ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. The framework relies on FONLL (Fixed-Order Next-to-Leading Logarithm) to model heavy-quark production in photonuclear collisions and employs a photon-flux reweighting procedure to describe the production cross sections in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. The GγA calculations are first validated against the photoproduction cross sections of D^* in electron-proton collisions at HERA. The predictions for the D⁰ production cross section in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC are then presented and compared to the first experimental results obtained by CMS at √\rm s_NN=5.36 TeV. The predictions are benchmarked against different choices of nuclear parton distribution functions, fragmentation functions, and renormalization and factorization scales.

Citations

• Measurement of D⁰ meson photoproduction in ultraperipheral heavy ion collisions
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