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 \le 3 GeV/c in
sqrt(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^bar)/dy|_(y=1.6)=0.243 +/- 0.013
(stat.) +/- 0.105 (data syst.) ^(+0.049)_(-0.087) (PYTHIA syst.) mb.Comment: 329 authors, pages text, 18 figures, tables. Submitted to Physical
Review D. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this
and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at
http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.htm