Cross section of D-mesons production via the c-quark fragmentation process at next-to-leading order accuracy in pp collisions at the 7TeV LHC

Abstract

In this paper, the differential cross section of charmed mesons production (D_{s}^{pm }, D^{0}, D^{*} and D^{*pm } and D^{pm }) are computed as a function of transverse momentum p_{T} and the total cross sections. The hadronization mechanism is considered via a fragmentation process of a c heavy quark to a light-heavy meson according to Suzuki’s model. The two-cutoff phase-space slicing method has been applied to calculate the phase-space integral of two- and three-body subprocess cross sections and fragmentation function (FF) at next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy. By using Monte Carlo (MC) techniques, we try to properly estimate the ratio of neutral to charged D-meson production R_{u/d} and the strangeness-suppression factor gamma _{s}. Our numerical results show that the NLO corrections of the FF have significant effect on D-mesons production and enhance the cross section ratio at NLO respect to leading order (LO) about 50%. A comparison indicates that our cross section results are in agreement (within uncertainties) with available data from ATLAS and ALICE and theoretical predictions of the fixed-order next-to-leading-logarithm (FONLL) approach and NLO parton-shower MC simulation (MC@NLO) in high-energy proton–proton (pp) collisions at sqrt{s}=7TeV.