Charm content in jets in proton-proton collisions with the ALICE experiment at CERN-LHC

Abstract

Charm and bottom quarks have been proposed as probes to study partonic matter produced in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. The detailed understanding of the production mechanisms in proton-proton collisions is of considerable interest as a QCD test tool and as reference calibration for heavy-ion studies. Measurements of the D meson yield in jets probe the production processes in which the observed D mesons are formed primarily from gluon splitting into c or b pairs. The charm content in jets is calculable in perturbative QCD, and the leading non-perturbative correction is expected to be significant at LHC energies. In this contribution we present a performance study of the reconstruction of charged D*± mesons in jets based on the first data collected by the ALICE experiment in minimum bias p+p collisions at = 7 TeV . D*+ mesons are reconstructed through the decay sequence D*+ → D0π+ and D0 → K−π+ (and its charge conjugate channel).