Nucleon structure and hard p–p processes at high energies

Abstract

The production of heavy flavour hadrons in pp collisions at large values of their transverse momenta can be a new unique source for estimation of intrinsic heavy quark contribution to the proton. We analyze the inclusive production of the open strangeness and the semi-inclusive hard processes of the photon and vector boson production accompanied by the c- or b-jets in pp collisions. We show that one should select the parton-level (sub)processes (and final-state signatures) that are the most sensitive to the intrinsic heavy quark contributions. We present some predictions for these processes made within the perturbative QCD including the intrinsic strangeness and intrinsic charm in the proton that can be verified in the NA61 experiment and at LHC.