Reconciling Open-Charm Production at the Fermilab Tevatron with QCD

摘要

We study the inclusive hadroproduction of D~0, D~+, D~(*+), and D_s~+ mesons at next-to-leading order in the parton model of quantum chromodynamics endowed with universal nonperturbative fragmentation functions fitted to e~+e~- annihilation data from CERN LEP1. Working in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme, we resum the large logarithms through the evolution of the fragmentation functions and, at the same time, retain the full dependence on the charm-quark mass without additional theoretical assumptions. In this way, the cross section distributions in transverse momentum recently measured by the CDF Collaboration in run Ⅱ at the Fermilab Tevatron are described within errors.