Proton structure from hard p-p processes at high energies

Abstract

Up to now, the existence of intrinsic (or valence-like) heavy quark components of the proton distribution function has not yet been confirmed or rejected. We show that this hypothesis can be verified at experiments on the inclusive production of the open strangeness (NA61) and at measurements of prompt photons or vector bosons accompanied by heavy flavour jets performed at LHC, CERN. Our theoretical study demonstrates that investigations of the intrinsic heavy quark contributions look very promising in hard processes like $pp\rightarrow K^\pm+X$ and $pp\rightarrow\gamma/Z/W +c(b)+X$. A possible observation of these components at the CBM, NICA experiments is discussed also.