On the production of charmed mesons in high-energy proton-proton collisions

Abstract We perform an analysis of lepton-pair data collected at the CERN ISR at centre-of-mass energies √ s = 53 and 63 GeV in three different configurations. We find that a large fraction of the non-resonant lepton-pair low-mass spectrum can be attributed to the semi-leptonic decay of charmed meson pairs that are produced in the pp collision. If no other process than charm production contributes to the electron-pair sample, the cross section for inclusive production of a D D pair in the central rapidity region is 10.1 ± 2.3 μ b per unit of rapidity.