A study of charm quark correlations in ultra-relativistic p + p collisions with PYTHIA

Measurements of heavy flavor quark (charm and bottom) correlations in heavy ion collisions are instrumental to understand the flavor dependence of energy loss mechanisms in hot and dense QCD media. Experimental measurements of these correlations in baseline $p$+$p$ collisions are crucial to understand the contributions of perturbative and non-perturbative QCD processes to the correlation functions and further help in interpreting correlation measurements in heavy ion collisions. In this paper, we investigate $D$-$\bar{D}$ meson correlations and $D$ with one particle from $D$ meson decay daughter correlations using PYTHIA Event Generator in $p$ + $p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 200, 500 and 5500 GeV. Charm/bottom events are found to contribute mainly to the away side/near side pattern of $D$-electron correlations, respectively. In the energy region of RHIC, $D$-$\bar{D}$ correlations inherit initial $c$-$\bar{c}$ correlations and $B\rightarrow DX$ decay contribution is insignificant. Furthermore, Bottom quark correlations are suggested to be applicable at LHC energy, as the bottom contributions on $D$ related correlations are relatively large.