Event engineering studies for heavy flavor production and hadronization in high multiplicity hadron-hadron and hadron-nucleus collisions

Heavy flavor measurements in high multiplicity proton-proton and proton-nucleus collisions at collider energies enable unique insights into their production and hadronization mechanism because experimental and theoretical uncertainties cancel in ratios of their cross sections relative to minimum bias events. We explore such event engineering using the color glass condensate (CGC) effective field theory to compute short-distance charmonium cross sections. The CGC is combined with heavy-quark fragmentation functions to compute D-meson cross sections; for the J/ψ, hadronization is described employing nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) and an improved color evaporation model. Excellent agreement is found between the CGC computations and the LHC heavy flavor data in high multiplicity events. Event engineering in this CGC+NRQCD framework reveals a very rapid growth in the fragmentation of the S1[8]3 state in rare events relative to minimum bias events.