Threshold corrections in bottom and charm quark hadroproduction at next-to-next-to-leading order

Abstract

We calculate threshold soft-gluon corrections to total cross sections and transverse momentum distributions for bottom and charm quark production in fixed-target experiments, considering both pp and pi- p interactions. We investigate the quality of the near threshold soft-gluon approximation at next-to-leading order (NLO) and calculate next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) corrections through next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic (NNNLL) accuracy, including some virtual terms. We find that the NNLO threshold corrections reduce the factorization and renormalization scale dependence of the cross sections.