charmcontaining

Charmcontaining is a descriptor used in particle physics to refer to particles or systems that include at least one charm quark (c) or its antiquark (c̄). In this context, hadrons that carry charm are typically called charmed hadrons. Open-charm mesons such as D0 (c ū), D+ (c d̄), and Ds+ (c s̄) are examples, as are charmed baryons like Lambda_c+ (udc) and Xi_c (usc, dsc). Bound states of a charm quark and an anti-charm quark, known as charmonium, include J/ψ and ηc.

Charm-containing hadrons are important probes of quantum chromodynamics and flavor physics. They are produced in high-energy collisions—such as electron-positron annihilation at B-factories or at LHC energies—and also appear in fixed-target experiments. The weak decays of charm quarks provide information on the CKM matrix, while their strong-interaction dynamics illuminate hadronization and spectroscopy. Charm quarks occupy a mass scale that makes both perturbative and nonperturbative QCD aspects relevant, giving a rich phenomenology of lifetimes, decay modes, and production rates.

In terms of conservation laws, charm is conserved in strong and electromagnetic processes but can change in weak decays. This combination makes charm-containing systems useful for tests of the Standard Model and for searches for new physics in rare decays or CP violation in the charm sector.