Open charm production cross section from combined LHC experiments in pp collisions at s=5.02 TeV

Open charm production in proton–proton collisions represents an important tool to investigate some of the most fundamental aspects of quantum chromodynamics, from the partonic mechanisms of heavy-quark production to the process of heavy-quark hadronisation. Over the last decade, the measurement of the production cross sections of charm mesons and baryons in proton–proton (pp) collisions was at the centre of a wide experimental effort at the Large Hadron Collider. Thanks to the complementarity of the different experiments, the production of charm hadrons was measured over a wide transverse momentum region and in different rapidity ranges. In this paper, the measurements of the charm hadrons D⁰, D∗+, D⁺, D_s⁺, Λ_c⁺ and Ξ_c⁰ performed by the ALICE, CMS and LHCb collaborations in pp collisions at the centre-of-mass energy s=5.02 TeV are combined to determine the total charm quark production cross section σ_cc¯ in a novel data-driven approach. The resulting total cc¯ cross section is (Formula presented.) The measured charm hadron distributions and corresponding cross sections are compared with the most recent theoretical calculations.