Hadroproduction of quark flavors

Abstract

We show that the extension of the conserved-vector-current hypothesis to gluons successfully describes the magnitude and energy dependence of the hadroproduction of strangeness, charm, and $b$, $t$ flavors in their manifest ($K, D, B$) or hidden ($\phi , \psi , \Upsilon$) forms. We investigate the relation between the hadronic excitation of $\psi$ and $\Upsilon$ particles for different assumptions regarding the quark structure of $\Upsilon$. In our approach cross sections are simply obtained by rescaling experimental data on the production of virtual photons by $\frac{{{\alpha }_g}^2\mathrm{}\left(M\right)\mathrm{}}{{\alpha }^2}$, where ${\alpha }_g\mathrm{}\left(M\right)\mathrm{}$ is the quark-gluon coupling constant, varying with the gluon mass $M$ in the sense of asymptotic freedom. We propose the powerful phenomenological tool that the total inclusive yield for producing flavor bound states scales in $\frac{\Gamma }{M^3}$ where $M$ and $\Gamma$ are respectively the mass and direct hadronic width of the state. We also show that the model successfully describes the relative production rates of dileptons (via $\psi$ as well as "off-resonance") for different beam particles.