Speaker
Description
Heavy quark production in hadronic collisions is considered one of the main tools for studying the properties of the strong interactions. In particular, the study of its production at forward rapidities, probes projectile partons with large light cone momentum fractions and target partons carrying a very small momentum fraction. Consequently, it is expected to provide important constraints on the small-x effects expected to be present in the target coming from the non-linear aspects of QCD, and on the large-x effects in the projectile, as e.g. an intrinsic heavy quark component on the proton wave function. In this work, the heavy quark production in proton-proton collisions is studied at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies. In particular, we investigate the D and B meson production at forward rapidities and estimate the impact of an intrinsic quark component in the proton’s wave function, considering the hybrid formalism, the solution of the running coupling Balitsky–Kovchegov equation and distinct descriptions for the parton distribution function. The contributions of gluon- and hard quark-initiated processes (charm for D mesons and bottom for B meson) are taken into account, and a comparison with the current LHCb data is performed. Our results indicate that the presence of an intrinsic quark strongly modifies the magnitude of the cross-section at ultra-forward rapidities, as well as, will imply an increase in the prompt neutrino flux at high energies.
