Inclusive Heavy-Flavor Production from Nuclei

Abstract

We describe a light-cone wave function formulation for hadroproduction of heavy-flavors at high energies. At moderate values of $x_F$ heavy-flavor production can be viewed as a diffractive excitation of heavy quark-antiquark Fock states, present in the interacting gluon from the projectile. The approach developed here is well suited to address coherence effects in heavy-quark production from nuclei at small values of $x_{t} \lsim 0.1\cdot A^{-1/3}$.