Energy and scale dependence of heavy-quark production in QCD

Summary

We consider the energy dependence of charm and beauty production cross-sections in pp or$\bar pp$ collisions up to √s=200 TeV for different values of the scale μ², using different proton structure functions. The cross-sections are computed accounting for leading-order and next-to-leading order perturbative QCD contributions. The values ofK-factors increase significantly with the energy for relatively small scale values, μ²≈M ², whereM is the heavy-quark mass, and do not practically depend on the energy for higher values, μ²=4M ²−8M ². The calculated cross-sections as functions of the energy for different values of μ² have a common crossing point if the gluon structure functions used have proper Altarelli-Parisi μ²-evolution. The same holds true when considering the energy and scale dependence of the heavy-quark cross-sections in high-energy photoproduction.