Inclusive production of heavy-flavored hadrons at NLO in the GM-VFNS

Abstract

We summarize recent progress in the theoretical description of heavy-flavored-hadron inclusive production at next-to-leading order in the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme. Specifically, we discuss the influence of finite-mass effects on the determination D-meson fragmentation functions from a global fit to e^+e^- annihilation data and on the transverse-momentum distribution of B-meson hadroproduction. We also demonstrate that the fixed-flavor-number scheme, implemented with up-to-date parton density functions and strong-coupling constant, provides a surprisingly good description of B-meson data from run II at the Fermilab Tevatron.