Heavy quark production as sensitive test for an improved description of high energy hadron collisions

Abstract

QCD dynamics at small quark and gluon momentum fractions or large total energy, which plays a major role for HERA, the Tevatron, RHIC and LHC physics, is still poorly understood. For one of the simplest processes, namely bottom-antibottom production, next-to-leading-order perturbation theory fails. We show that the combination of two recently developed theoretical concepts, the k_perp-factorization and the next-to-leading-logarithmic-approximation BFKL vertex, gives perfect agreement with data. One can therefore hope that these concepts provide a valuable foundation for the description of other high energy processes.

Comments: RevTeX, 4 pages, 7 figures titel and abstract changed, several formulations modified in the text, 1 figure dropped