Measurement of the production of charm jets tagged with D⁰ mesons in pp collisions at √s=7 TeV

The production of charm jets in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of s=7 TeV was measured with the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The measurement is based on a data sample corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 6.23 nb⁻¹, collected using a minimum-bias trigger. Charm jets are identified by the presence of a D⁰ meson among their constituents. The D⁰ mesons are reconstructed from their hadronic decay D⁰ →K⁻π⁺. The D⁰-meson tagged jets are reconstructed using tracks of charged particles (track-based jets) with the anti-k_T algorithm in the jet transverse momentum range 5<pT,jetch< 30 GeV/c and pseudorapidity |η_jet| < 0.5. The fraction of charged jets containing a D⁰-meson increases with pT,jetch from 0.042 ± 0.004 (stat) ± 0.006 (syst) to 0.080 ± 0.009 (stat) ± 0.008 (syst). The distribution of D⁰-meson tagged jets as a function of the jet momentum fraction carried by the D⁰ meson in the direction of the jet axis (z∥ch) is reported for two ranges of jet transverse momenta, 5<pT,jetch< 15 GeV/c and 15<pT,jetch< 30 GeV/c in the intervals 0.2<z‖ch<1.0 and 0.4<z‖ch<1.0, respectively. The data are compared with results from Monte Carlo event generators (PYTHIA 6, PYTHIA 8 and Herwig 7) and with a Next-to-Leading-Order perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics calculation, obtained with the POWHEG method and interfaced with PYTHIA 6 for the generation of the parton shower, fragmentation, hadronisation and underlying event. [Figure not available: see fulltext.]