We discuss calculations of the inclusive total cross section for heavy quark production at hadron collider energies within the context of perturbative quantum chromodynamics, including resummation of the effects of initial-state soft gluon radiation to all orders in the strong coupling strength. We resum the universal leading-logarithm contributions, and we restrict our integrations to the region of phase space that is demonstrably perturbative. We include a detailed comparison of the differences between ours and other methods. We provide predictions of the physical cross section as a function of the heavy quark mass in proton-antiproton reactions at center-of-mass energies of 1.8 and 2.0 TeV, and we discuss the estimated uncertainties.

• Received 2 June 1997

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.57.253