Charm hadrons in pp collisions at LHC energy within a coalescence plus fragmentation approach

The recent experimental measurements on pp collisions at .,/s = 5.02 TeV have shown a very large production of heavy baryons corresponding to a Ac/D0 ratio of about 0.5. This ratio is about one order of magnitude larger than what measured in e+e-, ep collisions, and is larger of about a factor two respect to the forward rapidity ratio in pp collisions at LHC. We apply for the first time to pp collisions a quark coalescence plus fragmentation approach developed for AA collisions, assuming the formation of Hot QCD matter at finite temperature, which was able to correctly predict a Ac/D similar to O (1) in AA collisions at RHIC energy. We calculate the heavy baryon/meson ratio and the pT spectra of charmed hadrons with and without strangeness content: D0, Ds, A+c , Ec and S2c in pp collisions at top LHC energies, finding a satisfactory result for the measured A+c /D0 and the 4-c/D0. At variance with other approaches a coalescence approach predicts also a significant production of S2c such that S2c/D0 similar to O (10-1). (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP3.