Eur. Phys. J. C (2004) 36: 201-213
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s2004-01894-1

theoretical physics

Threshold corrections in bottom and charm quark hadroproduction at next-to-next-to-leading order

¹ Cavendish Laboratory,, University of Cambridge,, Madingley Road, CB3 0HE, Cambridge, UK
² Nuclear Science Division,, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA 94720, Berkeley, USA
³ Physics Department, University of California at Davis,, CA 95616, Davis, USA

Abstract

We calculate threshold soft-gluon corrections to total cross sections and transverse momentum distributions for bottom and charm quark production in fixed target experiments, considering both pp and interactions. We investigate the quality of the near-threshold soft-gluon approximation at next-to-leading order (NLO) and calculate next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) corrections through next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic (NNNLL) accuracy, including some virtual terms. We find that the NNLO threshold corrections reduce the factorization and renormalization scale dependence of the cross sections.