Production of heavy quarks in hadron-hadron collisions

The production of heavy quarks in polarised (anti-)proton-proton collisions is one of the processes which can provide information about the currently largely unconstrained gluon polarisation Δg and about the sea quark densities Δanti q in the nucleon. For this purpose the calculation of the relevant cross sections in next-to-leading order of perturbative QCD is presented. The difference of the differential cross sections for the production of heavy quarks and antiquarks, the so-called charge asymmetry, is directly sensitive to next-to-leading order (NLO) corrections. Phenomenological studies for GSI FAIR, J-PARC and BNL-RHIC are given and the theoretical uncertainties of the NLO results are discussed. Besides with the analytical inclusive framework, the phase space integration can also be done completely numerically using Monte Carlo integration methods; this allows more flexibility in choosing experimentally relevant variables and a simpler modelling of experimental cuts. For this purpose the technical framework is presented and applied to polarised heavy quark hadroproduction