Abstract

Understanding how charm quarks are produced in high-energy collisions is an important step toward testing our current knowledge of the strong force. In this work, we present a detailed study of D-meson production in proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV. The analysis is based on data collected at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, with a focus on measurements performed by the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment. Differential production cross-sections are measured and compared with theoretical predictions derived from perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The results show overall agreement, with small deviations in specific kinematic regions. These findings provide improved constraints on gluon distributions and contribute to refining models of heavy-quark production.

Keywords

Charm quark, D meson, proton–proton collisions, Quantum Chromodynamics, gluon distribution, cross-section, LHCb