Heavy quark production at HERA and the LHC

TL;DR

This paper reviews heavy quark production measurements from HERA, their theoretical understanding within QCD, and their implications for the LHC, highlighting successes and limitations of current models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of heavy quark production, emphasizing the universality of fragmentation and discussing the agreement and discrepancies with QCD predictions.

Findings

QCD at NLO generally describes heavy quark production well

Heavy quark fragmentation is universal across experiments

Some details in the theory still show discrepancies

Abstract

Measurements of heavy quark production, particularly from HERA, their theoretical understanding and their relevance for the LHC are reviewed. The status of beauty and charm production is discussed in the context of the different components of the production process: the parton density function of the colliding hadrons; the hard scatter; and the fragmentation of the quarks into hadrons. The theory of QCD at next-to-leading order generally describes well the hadronic structure and the production of heavy quarks although sometimes fails in details which are highlighted. The fragmentation of heavy quarks measured at HERA is consistent with that at LEP and hence supports the notion of universality.