Study of heavy meson production in p–Pb collisions at S=5.02 TeV in the general-mass variable-flavour-number scheme

Abstract We study inclusive charm and bottom production, for both D and B mesons, in p–Pb collisions at the LHC. Numerical results for p T -differential production cross sections are obtained at next-to-leading-order in the general-mass variable-flavour-number scheme. We compare our results with recent data from ALICE, LHCb and CMS at a centre-of-mass energy of 5 TeV and find good agreement. A comparison with p–p cross sections does not reveal the presence of nuclear initial-state interaction effects that could be expected to become visible as deviations of the ratio of p–Pb and p–p cross sections from one.