Two lectures on heavy quark production in hadronic collisions

Abstract

These lectures present a pedagogical introduction to the physics of heavy-flavour production in hadronic collisions. The first lecture gives the theoretical background, with a discussion of leading-order calculations and of the effects of next-to-leading-order corrections. The origin and implications of the large logarithmic corrections appearing at this order are presented in an elementary way. The second lecture provides a survey of current experimental data on charm and bottom production, and describes their comparison with theoretical predictions. We emphasize the role played by some non-perturbative effects in the determination of charm distributions, and study the theoretical systematic uncertainties which affect our predictions.