Hadroproduction of D-mesons in 400 Gev/c p-p interactions

Production characteristics of D-mesons produced in 400 Gev/c (√s = 27.4 Gev) proton-proton collisions are studied. Comparisons are made to a simple QCD Fusion Model as well as to a model which includes color-string fragmentation. The production characteristics of particular interest are the total inclusive cross section, the differential cross sections dσ/DXF and dσ/dPT2 and the charged particle multiplicity of the proton-proton interactions. The data sample used in this study came from the experiment NA-27 which was carried out at CERN. In this experiment, the small rapid cycling bubble chamber LEBC was used in conjunction with a multipurpose hybrid spectrometer known as the EHS. Events were recorded using a minimum bias interaction trigger giving an experimental sensitivity of 38.5 ± 1.1 events/μb. The exposed film was subjected to a three fold visual scan to select charm decay candidates. These decay candidates were subjected to a careful selection and kinematic fit analysis. The result was that the 1.0 million proton-proton interactions recorded were reduced to a sample of 324 charm events. These results are compared to the above mentioned models of charm hadroproduction. The agreement between theory and experiment is, in general, good