Nuclear charm and bottom production: a comparison among high energy approaches

Abstract

We calculate the nucleon and nuclear photoproduction cross sections for heavy quarks within the $k_{\perp }$-factorization formalism, considering the current high energy approaches which include nuclear and saturation effects. Our results demonstrate that a future experimental analysis of this process would allow to constraint the QCD dynamics at high energies.

Comments: 10 pages, 2 figures. Version to be published in Eur. Phys. J. C