Charmed meson pair production in high‐energy pp$$ pp $$ collisions within the QCD color dipole approach

A study of double‐charmed meson production in high‐energy proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. Considering the color dipole formalism developed in the transverse momentum representation along with the double parton scattering mechanism, predictions are made for the transverse momentum differential cross section for different pairs of D$$ D $$‐mesons. The theoretical results cover the center‐of‐mass energy and forward rapidities available by the LHCb experiment. The proton–proton results considering different unintegrated gluon distributions are compared to the respective data collected at the LHC.