Open Access Publications from the University of California

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

• Author(s): Dainese, A.
• Vogt, R.
• Bondila, M.
• Eskola, K.J.
• Kolhinen, V.J.
• et al.
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\leq 0.01, and low scales, Q2\lsim 10 GeV2, 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\sim0, and transverse momentum p_T\rightarrow0 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 D0 reconstruction in the K-pi+ decay channel with the ALICE detector.