Heavy flavor production at high energy ep colliders

Abstract

The total production rates for heavy quark pairs due to gauge boson fusion processes at high energy ep colliders are evaluated. At HERA, bt̅ production dominates over tt̅ production for m_t≧60 GeV and observable up to m_t⋍80(90) GeV where the number of expected bt̅ events is about 15(10) for ∫L=200pb^-1. Including the contributions from ep→WX→btX the total number of expected bt events amounts to about 50 events for m_t⋍80GeV. The influence of thresholds for heavy quark pair production is also studied for the relevant structure functions F_i (x,Q²) and shown to contribute to the measured scaling violations. All these effects are sensitive to the heavy quark massesand to the shape of the gluon distribution which can thus be tested experimentally by analyzing heavy quark pair signals.