NLL resummation of the heavy-quark hadroproduction cross-section

Abstract

We compute the effect of soft-gluon resummation, at the next-to-leading-logarithmic level, in the hadroproduction cross-section for heavy flavours. Applications to top, bottom and charm total cross-sections are discussed. We find in general that the corrections to the fixed next-to-leading-order results are larger for larger renormalization scales, and small, or even negative, for smaller scales. This leads to a significant reduction of the scale-dependence of the results, for most experimental configurations of interest.