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Phys. Rev. D 76, 092002 (2007) [24 pages]

Measurement of single muons at forward rapidity in p+p collisions at s=200  GeV and implications for charm production

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S. S. Adler et al. PHENIX Collaboration
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Received 18 September 2006; revised 21 May 2007; published 13 November 2007

Muon production at forward rapidity (1.5≤|η|≤1.8) has been measured by the PHENIX experiment over the transverse momentum range 1≤pT≤3  GeV/c in s=200  GeV p+p collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. After statistically subtracting contributions from light hadron decays an excess remains which is attributed to the semileptonic decays of hadrons carrying heavy flavor, i.e. charm quarks or, at high pT, bottom quarks. The resulting muon spectrum from heavy flavor decays is compared to PYTHIA and a next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculation. PYTHIA is used to determine the charm quark spectrum that would produce the observed muon excess. The corresponding differential cross section for charm quark production at forward rapidity is determined to be dσcc̅ /dy|y=1.6=0.243±0.013(stat.)±0.105(data syst.)+0.049/-0.087(PYTHIA syst.)  mb.

© 2007 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.76.092002
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevD.76.092002
PACS:
13.85.Qk, 13.20.Fc, 13.20.He, 25.75.Dw