Quantum coherence in heavy-flavor production on nuclei

Abstract

We describe a light-cone wave function formalism for hadroproduction of heavy-flavors via gluon-gluon fusion. The developed approach is well suited to address coherence effects in heavy-quark production on nuclei at small $x_2\text{lsim}0.1\cdot A^{-1/3}$. Nuclear attenuation in hadroproduction of heavy-flavors is found to be similar to shadowing effects for heavy-flavor structure functions in deep-inelastic scattering from nuclei. Nevertheless, remaining differences in the theoretical formulation of both processes imply corrections to factorization theorems.

Comments: 23 pages, 1 figure (the PostScript file appended)