Experimental Aspects of Open Charm and Beauty Hadroproduction

摘要

The recent experimental results on charm are reviewed. The charm experiments may be divided into three general categories: those sampling visual detection techniques in which the production and decay of the charm particles are directly observed, counter experiments triggering on an electron or lambda /K exp 0 and observing a charm signal in the effective mass plot of detected particles, and counter experiments detecting prompt single or dileptons as signatures of the expected semileptonic charm decays. The salient features and results from each experiment are summarized. This is followed by a discussion on the inputs (branching ratios, A and x/sub F/ dependence) used to obtain charm production cross sections. Similar inputs are then used to deduce charm cross sections in different experiments so that their comparison is more meaningful. It is concluded that open beauty production in hadronic introductions is yet to be established. 25 refs., 5 figs. (ERA citation 10:050142)