Measurement of single muons at forward rapidity in p+p collisions at root s=200 GeV and implications for charm production

Muon production at forward rapidity (1.5 <=|eta|<= 1.8) has been measured by the PHENIX experiment over the transverse momentum range 1 <= p(T)<= 3 GeV/c in root s=200 GeV p+p collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. After statistically subtracting contributions from light hadron decays an excess remains which is attributed to the semileptonic decays of hadrons carrying heavy flavor, i.e. charm quarks or, at high p(T), bottom quarks. The resulting muon spectrum from heavy flavor decays is compared to PYTHIA and a next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculation. PYTHIA is used to determine the charm quark spectrum that would produce the observed muon excess. The corresponding differential cross section for charm quark production at forward rapidity is determined to be d sigma(c (c) over bar)/dy|(y=1.6)=0.243 +/- 0.013(stat.)+/- 0.105(data syst.)(-0.087)(+0.049)(PYTHIA syst.) mb.