Understanding Heavy Flavor Production at RHIC

Accurate assessments of the charm and bottom cross sections and kinematic distributions in hadron-hadron collisions are needed in order to understand the behavior of heavy flavors in more complex collisions. Neither the charm nor bottom cross sections were measured at before the startup of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The RHIC detectors are capable of measuring the heavy flavor transverse momentum distributions to pT∼0, making estimates of the total heavy flavor cross section feasible at a collider. It is thus possible to obtain and compare the total heavy flavor cross sections at RHIC with those measured at other energies. The charm production data, in particular, can have a considerable spread in the measured cross sections, even at a single energy. In addition, the small charm mass can lead to large theoretical uncertainties. We assess the theoretical uncertainties on the heavy flavor (charm and bottom) hadroproduction cross section. We discuss the importance of the quark mass, the renormalization and factorization scales and the parton densities on the estimate of the uncertainty.