Speaker
Description
Precise measurements of charm-strange hadron production are crucial for validating perturbative QCD calculations based on the factorization approach. In particular, comparing production yields of strange and non-strange charm hadrons is essential for understanding heavy-quark hadronization in hadronic collisions and for constraining models with different quark hadronisation approaches.
In this context, recent advances in charm-meson spectroscopy have led to the discovery of several excited charm-strange states, whose production yields in hadronic collisions remain unmeasured. Quantifying these yields would provide valuable insights into charm quark hadronization, given the significant contribution to the ground-state charm-hadron yields from their decays. Moreover, the production of short-lived resonances allows us to obtain information on the hadronic phase of the system created in heavy-ion collisions, and potentially present also in smaller collision systems.
This contribution presents new production measurements of the orbitally excited charm-strange mesons $\mathrm{D_{s1}}(2536)^+$ and $\mathrm{D_{s2}}^{*}(2573)^+$ in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV by the ALICE Collaboration. Their production-yield ratios relative to ground-state D mesons are reported, complementing and extending recent final results from proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV. Production yield ratios of $\mathrm{D_s}^+$ to $\mathrm{D}^+$ mesons in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV will also be reported and compared to state-of-the-art model predictions. The influence of the surrounding color-charge density on charm quark hadronisation, and the potential impact to charm-strange resonance production from a hadronic phase in high-multiplicity proton-proton collisions, will be investigated by performing the measurements in different event-multiplicity intervals.
| Category | Experiment |
|---|---|
| Collaboration (if applicable) | ALICE |
