Open charm production at high energies and the quark Reggeization hypothesis

Abstract

We study open charm production at high energies in the framework of the quasi-multi-Regge-kinematics approach applying the quark-Reggeization hypothesis implemented with Reggeon-Reggeon-particle and Reggeon-particle-particle effective vertices. Adopting the Kimber-Martin-Ryskin unintegrated quark and gluon distribution functions of the proton and photon, we thus nicely describe the proton structure function F_{2,c} measured at DESY HERA as well as the transverse-momentum distributions of D mesons created by photoproduction at HERA and by hadroproduction at the Fermilab Tevatron.

Comments: 14 pages, 3 figures