Speaker
Description
Open charm and beauty production in photonuclear collisions offer a theoretically controlled way to study the dynamics of quarks and gluons in nuclei. In this talk, we present the first next-to-leading order predictions for the inclusive production of charmed mesons in ultraperipheral lead–lead collisions at the LHC, obtained with the new G$\gamma$A–FONLL framework. The framework relies on FONLL (Fixed-Order Next-to-Leading Logarithm) to model heavy-quark production in photonuclear collisions and employs a photon-flux reweighting procedure to describe production cross sections in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. Recent calculations of the production cross section of $D^0$ mesons in ultraperipheral Pb–Pb collisions (Xn0n) at the LHC are presented and compared with the first experimental results. The predictions are benchmarked against different choices of nuclear parton distribution functions, fragmentation functions, and renormalization and factorization scales. New predictions for the cross section of diffractive open charm production in UPCs, as well as for open charm photoproduction at the Electron–Ion Collider, obtained with the same framework, will also be presented.
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