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Diffractive open charm photoproduction in ultraperipheral lead-lead and proton-lead collisions at the LHC

Vadim Guzey1,2, Gian Michele Innocenti3, Anna M. Staśto4, and Mark Strikman4

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014069 – Published 30 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rvjv-d4yg

Abstract

We calculate diffractive D0 photoproduction in ultraperipheral lead-lead (Pb-Pb) collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) within the recently developed generalized photon-nucleus fixed-order next-to-leading logarithm (GγA−FONLL) framework, where photon-lead diffraction is modeled using nuclear diffractive parton distributions obtained in the leading-twist shadowing approach and the photon fluxes include corrections for independent electromagnetic dissociation accompanying the hard photoproduction process. We then use the predicted diffractive cross section to quantify the coherent diffractive contribution rejected by the Xn0n neutron-tagged event selection adopted in the first measurement of D0 photoproduction in Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC, which requires neutron emission from only one of the two lead nuclei. In this work, we also extend the GγA−FONLL framework to proton-lead (p-Pb) ultraperipheral collisions and present predictions for inclusive and diffractive D0 photoproduction at the LHC. In this case, the dominant configuration is photon emission from the lead ion followed by photon-proton scattering, and the diffractive contribution is evaluated using proton diffractive parton distributions constrained by HERA data.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 014069– Published 30 July, 2026
  • Received 11 June 2026
  • Accepted 29 June 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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