Measurements of $D^0$ and $D^{\mathbf{*}}$ production in $p\mathbf{+}p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}\mathbf{=}200\mathrm{GeV}$

We report measurements of charmed-hadron $(D^0,D^{*})$ production cross sections at midrapidity in $p+p$ collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 200 GeV by the STAR experiment. Charmed hadrons were reconstructed via the hadronic decays $D^0\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}$, $D^{*+}\to D^0{\pi }^{+}\to K^{-}{\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{+}$ and their charge conjugates, covering the $p_T$ range of $0.6–2.0$ and $2.0–6.0\mathrm{GeV}/c$ for $D^0$ and $D^{*+}$, respectively. From this analysis, the charm-pair production cross section at midrapidity is $d\sigma /dy{|}_{y=0}^{c\overline{c}}=170\pm 45(\mathrm{stat}{)}_{-59}^{+38}(\mathrm{sys})\mu \mathrm{b}$. The extracted charm-pair cross section is compared to perturbative QCD calculations. The transverse momentum differential cross section is found to be consistent with the upper bound of a fixed-order next-to-leading logarithm calculation.