Small-x physics and heavy quark photoproduction in the semihard approach at HERA

Abstract

Processes of hevy quark photoproduction at HERA energies and beyond are investigated using the semihard ($k_{\bot}$ factorization) approach. The virtuality and longitudinal polarization of gluons in the photon - gluon subprocess as well as the saturation effects in the gluon distribution function at small $x$ have been taken into account. The total cross sections, rapidity and $p_{\bot}$ distributions of the charm and beauty quark photoproduction have been calculated. We obtained the some differences between the predictions of the standard parton model and the semihard approach used here.