Small-x physics and heavy quark photoproduction in the semihard approach at HERA

Abstract

Processes of hevy quark photoproduction at HERA energies and beyond are investigated using the semihard ($k_{\perp }$ factorization) approach. The virtuality and longitudinal polarization of gluons in the photon - gluon subprocess as well as the saturation effects in the gluon distribution function at small $x$ have been taken into account. The total cross sections, rapidity and $p_{\perp }$ distributions of the charm and beauty quark photoproduction have been calculated. We obtained the some differences between the predictions of the standard parton model and the semihard approach used here.

Comments: LaTeX, 10 pages, 5 figures (available on request via mail)