Charm-baryon production in proton-proton collisions
Min He (Department of Applied Physics, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China); Ralf Rapp (Cyclotron Institute and Department of Physics & Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA)
Recent measurements of charm-hadron production in proton-proton collisions at the LHC have found a surprisingly large baryon to meson ratio. We propose that this observation can be explained by the statistical hadronization model (SHM), by employing a largely augmented set of charm-baryon states beyond the current listings of the particle data group. We estimate the additional states using guidance from the relativistic quark model and from lattice QCD. Using charm- and strange-quark fugacity factors to account for the well-known suppression of heavy flavor in elementary collisions, we compute the yields and spectra of D, and hadrons in proton-proton collisions at TeV. Our main finding is that the enhanced feeddown from excited charm baryons can account for the ratio measured by ALICE at midrapidity, with some caveat for the forward-rapidity LHCb data. Furthermore, assuming independent fragmentation of charm quarks but with the hadronic ratios fixed by the SHM, the measured transverse-momentum () spectra of D-mesons and can also be described; in particular, the low- enhancement in the observed / ratio is attributed to the enhanced feeddown from “missing” charm-baryon states. We comment on the implications of these findings for measurements of and in heavy-ion collisions.