Abstract
We advocate charmed-hadron inclusive hadroproduction as a laboratory to probe intrinsic charm (IC) inside the colliding hadrons. Working at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme endowed with nonperturbative fragmentation functions recently extracted from a global fit to annihilation data from KEKB, CESR, and LEP1, we first assess the sensitivity of Tevatron data of , , and inclusive production to the IC parametrizations provided by Pumplin et al. We then argue that similar data from collisions at RHIC would have the potential to discriminate between different IC models provided they reach out to sufficiently large values of transverse momentum.
- Received 27 January 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.79.094009
©2009 American Physical Society