Heavy-quark correlations in photon-hadron collisions

Abstract

We describe a next-to-leading-order calculation of the fully exclusive parton cross section at next-to-leading order for the photoproduction of heavy quarks. We use our result to compute quantities of interest for current fixed-target experiments. We discuss heavy-quark total cross sections, distributions, and correlations.

Charm and bottom production: theoretical results versus experimental data

“…In the case of photoproduction, we expect QCD pre- dictions to be more reliable than in the hadroproduction case, since only one hadron is present in the initial state (see refs. [7] and [10] for a detailed discussion).…”

“…This last problem has been overcome after the work in refs. [3,10], while in the mean time more data (both for charm and bottom at xed target and in collider experiments) have become available. We therefore believe that it is now possible to undertake the comparison of theoretical results with data in a more systematic way.…”

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6] for hadroproduction and refs. [7][8][9][10] for photoproduction and electroproduction; some phenomenological applications are given in refs. [11,12]).…”

“…We therefore modi ed the calculations developed in refs. [3] and [10] in order to be able to take i n to account e ects such as the primordial transverse momenta of the incoming partons and the hadronization phenomena.…”

Heavy quark photoproduction in thek⊥-factorization approach

“…The gluon density as a function of the longitudinal momentum fraction x and virtuality scale Q 2 is known to an accuracy of a few percent from a global analysis of scaling violations of the proton structure function F 2 measured at HERA [7,8,9]. The QCD matrix elements of the partonic process have been calculated in next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy [10]. Still substantial theoretical uncertainties come from the heavy quark mass and the from renormalization and factorization scales, µ R and µ F .…”