ENERGY AND SCALE DEPENDENCE OF HEAVY-QUARK PRODUCTION IN QCD

We consider the energy dependence of charm and beauty production cross-sections in pp or ppBAR collisions up to square-root s = 200 TeV for different values of the scale mu2, using different proton structure functions. The cross-sections are computed accounting for leading-order and next-to-leading order perturbative QCD contributions. The values of K-factors increase significantly with the energy for relatively small scale values, mu2 almost-equal-to m2, where M is the heavy-quark mass, and do not practically depend on the energy for higher values, mu2= 4M2-8M2. The calculated cross-sections as functions of the energy for different values of mu2 have a common crossing point if the gluon structure functions used have proper Altarelli-Parisi mu2-evolution. The same holds true when considering the energy and scale dependence of the heavy-quark cross-sections in high-energy photoproduction.