Inclusive heavy-flavor production from nuclei

Abstract

We describe a light-cone wave function formulation for hadroproduction of heavy-flavors at high energies. At moderate values ofx _F heavy-flavor production can be viewed as a diffractive excitation of heavy quark-antiquark Fock states, present in the interacting gluon from the projectile. The approach developed here is well suited to address coherence effects in heavy-quark production from nuclei at small values ofx _t≲0.1·A ^−1/3.