Speaker
Description
Strange Charm-Meson Production in pp Collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV with ALICE
Precise measurements of charm-strange hadron production play a critical role in testing perturbative QCD calculations based on the factorization approach. Moreover, comparing the production yields of strange relative to that of non-strange charm hadrons in different colliding systems provides essential insights into heavy-quark hadronization in hadronic collisions and helps constrain models with different approaches to quark hadronization.
In this context, several excited charm-strange states have been observed in recent years, but their production yields in hadronic collisions remain unmeasured. Quantifying these yields is essential for understanding charm quark hadronization, as their decays contribute significantly to the yields of ground-state charm hadrons. Furthermore, studying the production of short-lived resonances offers insights into the hadronic phase of the system formed in heavy-ion collisions, which may also manifest in smaller collision systems.
This contribution presents the ALICE Collaboration's measurements of production-yield ratios of $\mathrm{D_s}^+$ to $\mathrm{D}^+$ mesons at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV as a function of charged particles multiplicity, and compares them to state-of-the-art theoretical predictions. Moreover, it shows the first production measurements of the orbitally excited charm-strange mesons $\mathrm{D_{s1}}(2536)^+$ and $\mathrm{D_{s2}}^{*}(2573)^+$ in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV in two multiplicity classes and at $\sqrt{s} = 13.6$ TeV as a function of transverse momentum.
These studies explore the influence of surrounding color-charge density on charm quark hadronization and investigate the potential impact on charm-strange resonance production from a hadronic phase in high-multiplicity proton-proton collisions by analyzing results across different event-multiplicity intervals.
