Applications of Perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics to Processes with Heavy Quarks

Abstract

In this thesis we study the b-quark fragmentation in top decay as well as the effect of the threshold resummation on heavy quark production in charged-current DIS. To predict the spectrum of b-flavored hadrons in top decay, we calculate at NLO the QCD corrections for bottom production in top decay with the b-mass fully taken into account. Using the perturbative fragmentation function formalism we then resum with NLL accuracy large collinear logs of the ratio of bottom-to-top mass, which leads to an essential improvement of the result. Next we perform the threshold resummation for the coefficient function for top decay with NLL accuracy. That resummation leads to an important improvement of the b-spectrum in the large energy fraction region. Finally, we extract information for the non-perturbative b-fragmentation into hadrons from e^+e^- data and make a prediction for the spectrum of those b-flavored hadrons produced in top-quark decay. Our second application is to charm production in charged-current DIS. We first calculate with NLL accuracy the soft-gluon resummed coefficient function for heavy quark production (initiated by a light quark) in DIS. Our result is applicable for the case of low momentum transfer that is of the order of the mass of the heavy quark. We also make a connection of this result to the known result for massless quark production. We then apply this result for charm quark production at NuTeV and HERA for a wide range of the transferred momentum, and present the effect of the resummation on the charm structure functions.