Large $\pt$ Hadroproduction of Heavy Quarks

Abstract

The production of heavy quarks at large $\pt$ ($\pt\gg m$) in hadronic collisions is considered. The analysis is carried out in the framework of perturbative fragmentation functions, thereby allowing a resummation at the NLO level of final state large mass logarithms of the kind $\log(\pt/m)$. The case of $b$-quark production is considered in detail. The resulting theoretical uncertainty from factorization/renormalization scales at large $\pt$ is found to be much smaller than that shown by the full $O(\as^3)$ perturbative calculation.