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Studies of beauty hadron and nonprompt charm hadron production in pp collisions at s=13  TeV within a transport model approach

Jialin He1, Xinye Peng1,2, Xiaoming Zhang2, and Liang Zheng1,3,2,*

  • *Contact author: zhengliang@cug.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 034008 – Published 5 February, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/p7tm-q7pl

Abstract

In high-energy proton-proton (pp) collisions at the LHC, nonprompt charm hadrons, originating from beauty hadron decays, provide a valuable probe for beauty quark dynamics, particularly at low transverse momentum where direct beauty measurements are challenging. We employ a multiphase transport (AMPT) model of string melting version coupled with pythia8 initial conditions to study the beauty hadron and nonprompt charm hadron productions in pp collisions at s=13  TeV. In this work, the beauty quark mass during the generation stage has been increased to reproduce the measured bb¯ cross section, and a beauty flavor-specific coalescence parameter rBMb is introduced to match LHCb measurements of beauty baryon-to-meson ratios. With these refinements, the AMPT model achieves a reasonable agreement with experimental data on beauty hadron yields and nonprompt charm hadron production from ALICE and LHCb. We present the transverse momentum and multiplicity dependence of nonprompt-to-prompt charm hadron ratios, providing new insights into the interplay between beauty quark production and the hadronization process. We emphasize that the multiplicity dependence of the nonprompt to prompt charm hadron productions can be useful to constrain the flavor dependences of the coalescence dynamics. This work establishes a unified framework for future studies of heavy quark transport and collective flow behavior in small collision systems.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 034008– Published 5 February, 2026
  • Received 24 September 2025
  • Accepted 20 January 2026
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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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