Speaker
Description
Measurements of heavy flavor production in proton-proton ($p+p$) collisions are critical for testing perturbative QCD (pQCD) calculations and serve as an essential baseline for studying nuclear matter effects in heavy-ion collisions. In this presentation, we will report on the production of $D^0$ and $D^*$ mesons in $p+p$ collisions at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 510$ GeV, utilizing the data collected by the STAR experiment at RHIC in 2017.
These charmed mesons are reconstructed via their hadronic decay channels, specifically $D^0 \rightarrow K^-\pi^+$ and $D^{*+} \rightarrow D^0\pi^+ \rightarrow K^-\pi^+\pi^+$ (and their charge conjugates). The signals have been extracted over a broad kinematic range, extending down to very low transverse momentum ($p_T$) with $0 < p_T < 2.1$ GeV/$c$ for $D^0$ and $2.0 < p_T < 6.0$ GeV/$c$ for $D^*$.
We will present the invariant cross-sections as a function of $p_T$, corrected for detector acceptance, reconstruction efficiency, and trigger biases. These measurements of the charm production cross-section will be compared with pQCD calculations to test the validity of the theoretical framework at this presented collision energy. The results will provide essential constraints on the energy dependence of charm production cross-sections, bridging the kinematic gap between RHIC and LHC energies and refining the theoretical baseline for heavy-ion studies.
| Is this an experimental talk? | Yes |
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| Is this on behalf of a collaboration? | Yes |
| Which collaboration? | STAR Collaboration |
| Are you willing to present as a poster if it is not selected for oral presentation? | Yes |