https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2464-0
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Revisiting the 
-meson production at the hadronic colliders
1
Department of Physics, Chongqing University of Science and Technology, Chongqing, 401331, P.R. China
2
Department of Physics, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 401331, P.R. China
* e-mail: wuxg@cqu.edu.cn
Received:
3
April
2013
Revised:
14
May
2013
Published online:
12
June
2013
The hadronic production of the heavy-flavored hadron provides a challenging opportunity to test the validity of pQCD predictions. In the paper, we make a comparative study on the properties of the hadroproduction within either the fixed-flavor-number scheme (FFNS) or the general-mass variable-flavor-number scheme (GM-VFNS). By using FFNS, as is previously adopted in the literature, one only needs to deal with the dominant gluon–gluon fusion mechanism via the subprocess 
. While by using GM-VFNS, one needs to deal with two mechanisms: one is the gluon–gluon fusion mechanism and the other is the extrinsic heavy quark mechanism via the subprocesses 
and 
. It is found that both mechanisms can provide reasonable contributions to the hadroproduction under the GM-VFNS, and there is double counting for those two mechanisms in specific kinematic regions. At the Tevatron, the differences between the estimations of FFNS and GM-VFNS are small, e.g. after cutting off the small p
T
events (cf. p
T
>4 GeV), the
p
T
-distributions are almost coincide with each other. However, these differences are obvious at the LHC. The forthcoming more precise data on LHC shall provide a good chance to check which scheme is more appropriate to deal with the -meson production and to further study the heavy quark components in hadrons.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and Società Italiana di Fisica, 2013
