Production of charm mesons at high transverse momentum in 515 GeV / c π − - nucleon

We present results on the production of high transverse momentum charm mesons in collisions of 515 GeV/c negative pions with beryllium and copper targets. The experiment recorded a large sample of events containing high transverse momentum (pT ) showers detected in an electromagnetic calorimeter. From these data, a sample of charm mesons has been reconstructed via their decay into the fully charged Kππ mode. A measurement of the single inclusive transverse momentum distribution of charged D mesons from 1 to 8 GeV/c is presented. An extrapolation of the measured differential cross section yields an integrated D cross section of 11.4±2.7(stat)±3.3(syst) μb per nucleon for D mesons with xF > 0. The data are compared with expectations based upon next-to-leading order perturbative QCD, as well as with results from pythia. We also compare our integrated D cross section with