This paper reports a measurement of $D^{*\pm }$ meson production in jets from proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=7\mathrm{TeV}$ at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The measurement is based on a data sample recorded with the ATLAS detector with an integrated luminosity of $0.30{\mathrm{pb}}^{-1}$ for jets with transverse momentum between 25 and 70 GeV in the pseudorapidity range $|\eta |<2.5$. $D^{*\pm }$ mesons found in jets are fully reconstructed in the decay chain: $D^{*+}\to D^0{\pi }^{+}$, $D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}$, and its charge conjugate. The production rate is found to be $N(D^{*\pm })/N(\mathrm{\text{jet}})=0.025\pm 0.001(\mathrm{stat}.)\pm 0.004(\mathrm{syst}.)$ for $D^{*\pm }$ mesons that carry a fraction $z$ of the jet momentum in the range $0.3<z<1$. Monte Carlo predictions fail to describe the data at small values of $z$, and this is most marked at low jet transverse momentum.

• Received 19 December 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.85.052005

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© 2012 CERN, for the ATLAS Collaboration