Inclusive UPC charm photoproduction in ALICE

Abstract

Ultra-peripheral heavy-ion collisions provide an opportunity to use inelastically photoproduced charm to study the nuclear gluon distribution. In these collisions, a photon emitted from one nucleus interacts with a gluon in the target nucleus, producing a charm anti-charm quark pair. These fragment to open- or hidden-charm hadrons, which are reconstructed. The transverse momentum distribution for photoproduced D0 mesons are presented, and the results compared to model calculations.