Speaker
Description
Measurements of heavy flavor production in proton-proton ($p+p$) collisions are critical for testing perturbative QCD (pQCD) calculations and serve as an essential baseline for studying nuclear matter effects in heavy-ion collisions. In this presentation, we will report on the production of $D^0$ and $D^*$ mesons in $p+p$ collisions at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 510$ GeV, utilizing the data collected by the STAR experiment at RHIC in 2017.
These charmed mesons are reconstructed via their hadronic decay channels, specifically $D^0 \rightarrow K^-\pi^+$ and $D^{*+} \rightarrow D^0\pi^+ \rightarrow K^-\pi^+\pi^+$ (and their charge conjugates). The signals have been extracted over a broad kinematic range, extending down to very low transverse momentum ($p_T$) with $0 < p_T < 2.1$ GeV/$c$ for $D^0$ and $2.0 < p_T < 6.0$ GeV/$c$ for $D^*$.
This presentation presents the current status of the $D^0$ and $D^*$ measurements in p+p collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 510$ GeV reconstructed through these hadronic decay channels as performed by the STAR experiment.