Heavy Flavour Production in pp and Heavy Ion Collisions in QCD Up to LHC Energies

Abstract

Charm production in pp collisions is considered in the framework of perturbative QCD. The values of two parameters, the charm quark mass $m_c$ and the QCD scale mu^2, are determined from the comparison of the theoretical calculations with experimental data. The RHIC data on charm and beauty production are compared with the k_T-factorization approach predictions and with standard NLO QCD. The calculated results underestimate the STAR Collaboration data. The role of possible nuclear effects is discussed. The predictions for LHC energies are also given.