Open charm production cross section from combined LHC experiments in pp collisions at $$\sqrt{s} = 5.02$$ TeV

Abstract

AbstractOpen charm production in proton–proton collisions represents an important tool to investigate some of the most fundamental aspects of quantum chromodynamics, from the partonic mechanisms of heavy-quark production to the process of heavy-quark hadronisation. Over the last decade, the measurement of the production cross sections of charm mesons and baryons in proton–proton (pp) collisions was at the centre of a wide experimental effort at the Large Hadron Collider. Thanks to the complementarity of the different experiments, the production of charm hadrons was measured over a wide transverse momentum region and in different rapidity ranges. In this paper, the measurements of the charm hadrons $$D^{0}$$ D 0 , $$D^{*+}$$ D ∗ + , $$D^{+}$$ D + , $$D^{+}_{s}$$ D s + , $$\Lambda _{c}^{+}$$ Λ c + and $$\Xi _{c}^{0}$$ Ξ c 0 performed by the ALICE, CMS and LHCb collaborations in pp collisions at the centre-of-mass energy $$\sqrt{s}=5.02$$ s = 5.02 TeV are combined to determine the total charm quark production cross section $$\sigma _{c\bar{c}}$$ σ c c ¯ in a novel data-driven approach. The resulting total $$c\overline{c}$$ c c ¯ cross section is $$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} \sigma _{c\overline{c}} ({\textrm{pp}},5.02\,{\textrm{TeV}}) ={}&8.34 \pm 0.22\mathrm { (stat.) } {}^{+0.37}_{-0.37} \mathrm { (syst.) } {}^{+0.36}_{-0.46} \mathrm { (extr.) } {}^{+0.68}_{-0} (\Omega _c) \,{\text {mb}}. \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$ σ c c ¯ ( pp , 5.02 TeV ) = 8.34 ± 0.22 ( stat . ) - 0.37 + 0.37 ( syst . ) - 0.46 + 0.36 ( extr . ) - 0 + 0.68 ( Ω c ) mb . The measured charm hadron distributions and corresponding cross sections are compared with the most recent theoretical calculations.