Heavy quarks, such as charm and beauty, possess masses significantly larger than the characteristic energy scale of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), and are thus predominantly produced in hard-scattering processes with large momentum transfer ($Q^{ 2}$). This makes them effective probes for verifying QCD calculations and investigating heavy-quark hadronization processes across various collision systems. Recent measurements of charm meson and baryon production in proton--proton (pp) collisions at the LHC have enabled, for the first time, a determination of the total charm production cross section, including contributions from all ground-state charm hadrons.Additionally, the fragmentation fractions of charm quarks into hadrons in pp collisions have been quantified.
Categories: hep-ex nucl-ex