Large $\text{pt}$ Hadroproduction of Heavy Quarks

Abstract

The production of heavy quarks at large $\text{pt}$ ($\text{pt}\gg m$) in hadronic collisions is considered. The analysis is carried out in the framework of perturbative fragmentation functions, thereby allowing a resummation at the NLO level of final state large mass logarithms of the kind $\log (\text{pt}/m)$. The case of $b$-quark production is considered in detail. The resulting theoretical uncertainty from factorization/renormalization scales at large $\text{pt}$ is found to be much smaller than that shown by the full $O({\text{as}}^3)$ perturbative calculation.

Comments: LaTeX, 16 pages with 6 encapsulated postscript figures pasted in with epsf and sent in a separate uuencoded file. Other 14 figures are available from the authors, FNT/T-93/43