Current issues in open charm hadroproduction and new preliminary results from Fermilab E769

摘要

At the collision energies achieved in modern fixed target experiments, charm quarks are predominantly produced from gluon-gluon collisions where one gluon originates from each of the initial state hadrons. The production cross section thus depends on the combination of the gluon distributions of the colliding hadrons and the partonic cross section. Here, the authors review the experimental data on total charm cross section, fragmentation into charm species, dependence of the charm cross section on beam flavor, atomic mass, and transverse momentum, charm pair correlations, and leading particle asymmetry. Included are new preliminary results from Fermilab experiment E769.