D meson enhancement in pp collisions at the LHC due to nonlinear gluon evolution

Abstract

When nonlinear effects on the gluon evolution are included with constraints from HERA, the gluon distribution in the free proton is enhanced at low momentum fractions, x < 0.01, and low scales, Q^2 < 10 GeV^2, relative to standard, DGLAP-evolved, gluon distributions. Consequently, such gluon distributions can enhance charm production in pp collisions at center of mass energy 14 TeV by up to a factor of five at midrapidity, y \sim 0, and transverse momentum p_T -> 0 in the most optimistic case. We show that most of this enhancement survives hadronization into D mesons. Assuming the same enhancement at leading and next-to-leading order, we show that the D enhancement may be measured by D^0 reconstruction in the K^-π^+ decay channel with the ALICE detector.