Speaker
Description
Charm-baryon production measurements in proton--proton (pp) collisions at the LHC provide valuable input for understanding charm-quark hadronization mechanisms and testing perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) based calculations. Recent measurements show baryon-to-meson ratios significantly higher than those measured in $\mathrm{e}^{+}\mathrm{e}^{-}$ collisions, suggesting a collision-system dependence of the fragmentation fractions, and challenging predictions based on a factorization approach. Several QCD-inspired models (e.g., Catania, POWLANG, QCM) and Monte Carlo event generators (e.g., PYTHIA$~$8, EPOS$~$4) attempt to describe charm-quark hadronization, but most fail to simultaneously reproduce the yields of both strange and non-strange charm baryons. Measurements of charm-baryon multiplicity-differential yields probe the interplay between fragmentation and coalescence processes and their evolution as a function of the event multiplicity, providing stringent constraints on hadronization models and improving our understanding of hadronization in small systems.
We present the status of the measurement of $\Omega_{\mathrm{c}}^{0}$-baryon production as a function of charged-particle multiplicity in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13.6~\mathrm{TeV}$ with ALICE, using data samples collected during LHC Run 3. The analysis reconstructs $\Omega_{\mathrm{c}}^{0}$ candidates via the hadronic decay channel $\Omega_{\mathrm{c}}^{0} \to \Omega^{-}\pi^{+}$ and its charge conjugate using a multiclass machine-learning classifier. The latest results on $\Omega_{\mathrm{c}}^{0}$ production as a function of $p_{\mathrm{T}}$ in inelastic events in the 0--100$\%$, 0--10$\%$, 10--50$\%$, and 50--100$\%$ multiplicity-percentile intervals of the pp cross section will be shown.
