Hadroproduction of open heavy flavour for PDF analyses

Abstract

Due to the large masses of the charm and bottom quarks, their production cross sections are calculable within the perturbative QCD. This makes the heavy-quark mesons important observables in high-energy collisions of protons and nuclei. However, the available calculations for heavy-flavored-meson hadroproduction have been somewhat problematic in reliably describing the cross sections across the full kinematic range from zero to very high $p_{\rm T}$. This has put some question marks on the robustness of LHC heavy-flavored-meson measurements in studying the partonic structure of the colliding hadrons and nuclei. Here, we introduce SACOT-$m_{\rm T}$ - a novel scheme for open heavy-flavour hadroproduction within the general-mass variable-flavour-number formalism that solves this problem. The introduced scheme is an analogue of the SACOT-$\chi$ scheme often used for deeply-inelastic scattering in global analyses of PDFs.