HADROPRODUCTION OF CHARM AND BEAUTY a.pdf

HADROPRODUCTION OF CHARM AND BEAUTY a PAUL E. KARCHIN Wayne State University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, 666 West Hancock Street, Detroit, Michigan 48201, USA Recent results on the hadroproduction of charm and beauty are discussed in the context of the current theoretical and experimental status. The areas covered include production of open charm and beauty particles and charm and beauty quarkonia. Experimental results from both fixed target and colliding beam exper- iments are presented and compared to theoretical predictions. Predictions based on QCD perturbation theory are generally successful in explaining the shapes of differential cross sections but underestimate the scale of the cross section by factors of 2-3. An exception is production of the vector meson quarkonia which cannot be satisfactorily explained by perturbative processes alone. 1 Introduction This review emphasizes recent progress in the understanding of the hadropro- duction of charm and beauty with an attempt to explain the new developments in the context of the fundamental questions of interest. Experimental and the- oretical work is presented which best illustrates the subject. In cases where two or more illustrations of the same topic are available, usually one is cho- sen for presentation here and the others cited as references. In making these choices, some preference is given to results published in the regular journals over preliminary results. However, important preliminary results are also pre- sented here. As there are many recent publications in this field, the author sincerely hopes that the fraction of the available results presented here serves to stimulate interest in the whole. 2 Theory At high energy, heavy quark production is dominated by gluon collisions. For example, in a pp collision, illustrated in Figure 1, the valence quarks are spec- tators while the hard interaction producing the heavy quark pair is via gluon fusion. Many important characteristics of the heavy