Hadroproduction of quark flavors

Abstract

We show that the extension of the conserved-vector-current hypothesis to gluons successfully describes the magnitude and energy dependence of the hadroproduction of strangeness, charm, and $b$, $t$ flavors in their manifest ($K, D, B$) or hidden ($\ensuremath{\varphi}, \ensuremath{\psi}, \ensuremath{\Upsilon}$) forms. We investigate the relation between the hadronic excitation of $\ensuremath{\psi}$ and $\ensuremath{\Upsilon}$ particles for different assumptions regarding the quark structure of $\ensuremath{\Upsilon}$. In our approach cross sections are simply obtained by rescaling experimental data on the production of virtual photons by $\frac{{{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{g}}^{2}(M)}{{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{2}}$, where ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{g}(M)$ is the quark-gluon coupling constant, varying with the gluon mass $M$ in the sense of asymptotic freedom. We propose the powerful phenomenological tool that the total inclusive yield for producing flavor bound states scales in $\frac{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}{{M}^{3}}$ where $M$ and $\ensuremath{\Gamma}$ are respectively the mass and direct hadronic width of the state. We also show that the model successfully describes the relative production rates of dileptons (via $\ensuremath{\psi}$ as well as off-resonance) for different beam particles.