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Inclusive open charm photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC with in the generalized photon-nucleus fixed-order next-to-leading logarithm framework

Matteo Cacciari1,2, Gian Michele Innocenti3, and Anna M. Staśto4

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 094029 – Published 18 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/1w13-r2tr

Abstract

We compute the inclusive D0 production cross section in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC as a function of the D0 transverse momentum and rapidity. These calculations are carried out within the new generalized photon-nucleus FONLL (GγA−FONLL) framework, which can predict photonuclear cross sections for charm and beauty hadrons in electron-proton, electron-nucleus, and ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. The framework relies on fixed-order next-to-leading logarithm (FONLL) to model heavy-quark production in photonuclear collisions and employs a photon-flux reweighting procedure to describe the production cross sections in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. The GγA calculations are first validated against the photoproduction cross sections of D* in electron-proton collisions at HERA. The predictions for the D0 production cross section in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC are then presented and compared to the first experimental results obtained by CMS at sNN=5.36  TeV. The predictions are benchmarked against different choices of nuclear parton distribution functions, fragmentation functions, and renormalization and factorization scales.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 094029– Published 18 November, 2025
  • Received 22 June 2025
  • Accepted 22 October 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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