Charm production at the CERN proton-antiproton collider

Evidence for the production of charged D/sup */ mesons has been obtained in proton-antiproton collisions at center of mass energy 540 GeV with the UA1 detector at the CERN collider. The search was confined to the charged particle fragments of hadronic jets, which are expected to be predominantly gluon jets in this experiment. The observed D/sup */ decays were used to form a fragmentation distribution in the variable z, which is the fraction of the jet momentum carried by the D/sup */. This mean of this distribution is a z = 0.2, suggesting that the charm quark of the D/sup */ is not the initiator of the jet. The production rate of charged D/sup */ relative to jets was found to be 0.65 +/- 0.19 +/- 0.33. This large rate coupled with the soft fragmentation distribution, lead to the conclusion that the most likely source of the charm particles is the fragmentation of gluon jets into cc pairs. This result is probably reflective of the QCD prediction for flavor independence of gluon-quark couplings