Inclusive open charm photoproduction in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC with in the generalized photon-nucleus fixed-order next-to-leading logarithm framework

We compute the inclusive D 0 production cross section in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC as a function of the D 0 transverse momentum and rapidity. These calculations are carried out within the new generalized photon-nucleus FONLL ( G γ A − FONLL ) framework, which can predict photonuclear cross sections for charm and beauty hadrons in electron-proton, electron-nucleus, and ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. The framework relies on fixed-order next-to-leading logarithm (FONLL) to model heavy-quark production in photonuclear collisions and employs a photon-flux reweighting procedure to describe the production cross sections in ultraperipheral heavy-ion collisions. The G γ A calculations are first validated against the photoproduction cross sections of D * in electron-proton collisions at HERA. The predictions for the D 0 production cross section in ultraperipheral Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC are then presented and compared to the first experimental results obtained by CMS at s NN = 5.36 TeV . The predictions are benchmarked against different choices of nuclear parton distribution functions, fragmentation functions, and renormalization and factorization scales.