Speaker
Description
Quantum Chromodynamics describes the proton as a bound state of quarks and gluons. However, it is unclear whether the heavy quarks, i.e. quarks whose mass is larger than the proton mass, take part to the non perturbative dynamics of the proton. They are the so-called intrinsic heavy quarks. It has been discussed for a long time that the charm quark, that is the lightest heavy quark and its mass sits slightly above the proton mass, could have a non negligible intrinsic component. However, so far all the efforts to establish the presence of an intrinsic charm remained inconclusive. Here, disentangling the non perturbative component from charm-anticharm pairs arising from high-energy radiation, we provide evidence of intrinsic charm in the proton by exploiting a high-precision determination of the quark-gluon content of the proton based on machine learning and a large experimental dataset. We confirm these findings by comparing to very recent data on Z-boson production with charm jets from the LHCb experiment.
| Parallel Session | Invited Plenary Talk |
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