Speaker
Description
The open heavy-flavor-production process is of great importance for collider physics since it is sensitive to the gluon PDF at low $x$. We use an existing general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNS) implementation of this process to study D- and B-meson production in proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions, which we extend by an interface to the PineAPPL gridding library. The latter makes it possible to evaluate the predictions with different PDFs or FFs in only a fraction of the time needed by a full recalculation. Among others, we study the FF dependence and uncertainty of the predictions, where, for instance, we observe a small dependence on variations of the fragmentation scale around the central value. The study includes an analysis of the probed kinematic region of the predictions, including the fragmentation variable $z$. We plan to release the PDF- and FF-independent grids of the predictions produced with an upcoming update of the PineAPPL library. These grids will then be used in upcoming nCTEQ global nPDF fits.