Heavy-Quark Production at RHIC and LHC to O(alpha_s^3) (with P. Valerio); publications related to this topic: I. Sarcevic and P. Valerio, Phys. Lett. B338, 426 (1994); I. Sarcevic and P. Valerio, Phys. Rev. C51, 1433 (1995); I. Sarcevic, Nucl. Phys. A590, 499c (1995).

Studying charm and bottom production at RHIC and LHC can provide an important test of pQCD and the parton model. In addition, enhanced charm production in heavy-ion collisions has been proposed to be a signal for the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Charm production from hard parton-parton scatterings is the important background to this process. We calculate charm and bottom production in hadronic and nuclear collisions at Fermilab, RHIC and LHC energies. We include next-to-leading order, radiative corrections and nuclear shadowing effect. We find that next-to-leading order corrections are large and that the effective K-factor has strong p_T dependence. We study the effect of small-x behavior of gluon densities in a nucleon/nucleus on the charm and bottom production. Our theoretical study of charm production show that combined measurements of charm production in hadronic and nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC energies can be used to obtain valuable information about the gluon density in a nucleon and in a nucleus in the small- Q^2 and the small-x region.