Understanding the Feynman-x distribution of charm D mesons produced in hadronic collisions

Abstract

An attempt has been made to demonstrate that the addition of the Drell-Yan-type diagram to the standard fusion contribution to charm production leads to the broadening of the x distribution of the charm D mesons compared to the fusion contribution alone. For the Drell-Yan-type calculation we have made two choices for the charm structure function: namely, soft charm and hard charm; the soft charm function shows a large difference between the leading and the nonleading D mesons, while the hard charm function does not show this difference.