Measurement of the production of a boson in association with a charmed hadron in collisions at with the ATLAS detector
G. Aad (CPPM, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS/IN2P3, Marseille, France); B. Abbott (Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA); K. Abeling (II. Physikalisches Institut, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany); S. H. Abidi (Physics Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, USA); A. Aboulhorma (Faculté des sciences, Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco); et al - Show all 2899 authors
The production of a boson in association with a single charm quark is studied using of proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The charm quark is tagged by the presence of a charmed hadron reconstructed with a secondary-vertex fit. The boson is reconstructed from the decay to either an electron or a muon and the missing transverse momentum present in the event. The charmed mesons reconstructed are and and the charge conjugate decays in the fiducial regions where , , , and . The integrated and normalized differential cross sections as a function of the pseudorapidity of the lepton from the boson decay, and of the transverse momentum of the charmed hadron, are extracted from the data using a profile likelihood fit. The measured total fiducial cross sections are , , , and . Results are compared with the predictions of next-to-leading-order quantum chromodynamics calculations performed using state-of-the-art parton distribution functions. Additionally, the ratio of charm to anticharm production cross sections is studied to probe the quark asymmetry. The ratio is found to be . The ratio and cross-section measurements are consistent with the predictions obtained with parton distribution function sets that have a symmetric sea, indicating that any asymmetry in the Bjorken- region relevant for this measurement is small.