We present results on the production of high transverse momentum charm mesons in collisions of 515 GeV/c negative pions with beryllium and copper targets. The experiment recorded a large sample of events containing high transverse momentum showers detected in an electromagnetic calorimeter. From these data, a sample of charm mesons has been reconstructed via their decay into the fully charged K pi pi mode. A measurement of the single inclusive transverse momentum distribution of charged D mesons from 1 to 8 GeV/c is presented. An extrapolation of the measured differential cross section yields an integrated charged D cross section of 11.4+-2.7(stat)+-3.3(syst) microbarns per nucleon for charged D mesons with Feynman x greater than zero. The data are compared with expectations based upon next-to-leading order perturbative QCD, as well as with results from PYTHIA. We also compare our integrated charged D cross section with measurements from other experiments.
The mean values of PT are the PT values which correspond to the average values of the cross sections in the appropriate bins as determined by the PYTHIA Mponte-Carlo.
The PYTHIA Monte-Carlo simulation is used for extrapolation of D+- cross section for XL < -0.2.