Parton distributions and heavy quark production on nucleon and nuclear targets

Abstract

Abstract The perturbative QCD evolution equation and the respective parton distributions in a proton are discussed, mainly in small x region. The different possibilities of shadow corrections are considered which allow one to avoid the unitarity violation. The possibility of estimation of the quality of phenomenological sets of the structure functions on the base of perturbative QCD is presented. Two approximate methods to extract the gluon distributions directly from the F2(x, Q2) data are discussed together with the new HERA data. Charm and beauty hadroproduction and photoproduction processes are considered in the framework of perturbative QCD and the results are compared with conventional parton model predictions. The role of infrared region contribution to F2(xQ2) structure function is discussed. The case of nuclear targets is considered also and A-dependences of charmed and beauty hadron production cross sections are calculated accounting for the difference of parton distributions in free and bound n...