Threshold Resummation of the Total Cross Section for Heavy Quark Production in Hadronic Collisions

Abstract

We discuss calculations of the inclusive total cross section for heavy quark production at hadron collider energies within the context of perturbative quantum chromodynamics, including resummation of the effects of initial-state soft gluon radiation to all orders in the strong coupling strength. We resum the universal leading-logarithm contributions, and we restrict our integrations to the region of phase space that is demonstrably perturbative. We include a detailed comparison of the differences between ours and other methods. We provide predictions of the physical cross section as a function of the heavy quark mass in proton-antiproton reactions at center-of-mass energies of 1.8 and 2.0 TeV, and we discuss estimated uncertainties.