Fotoprodução de quarks pesados em colisões próton-próton no grande colisor de hádrons

Abstract

One of the issues of interest in hadronic physics is the determination of partonic distribution of hadrons, which has a large uncertainty associated to the content of gluons in high energy particles (small x). In this regime, the hadrons are composed predominantly by gluons. A process that allows to study the partonic distribution is the photoproduction of heavy quarks, whose cross section is dependent on the gluons distribution of the hadron. The HERA electron-proton (ep) collider measurements of this process did not allow the distinction among the di erent parameterizations of the partonic distributions. Future measures of this process in electron-proton collisions will be possible with the implementation of LHeC collider. An alternative is to use the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the study of photonhadron interactions. In this work we study the production of heavy quarks in proton-proton collisions at the LHC, considering various existing parameterizations for the gluons distribution. We estimate the photoproduction cross section of the Charm and Bottom quarks and the corresponding rapidity distributions, considering proton-proton interactions for LHC energies. Our results demonstrate that this process can be used to constrain the bahaviour of the partonic distributions for high energies.