Heavy quark production and gluon shadowing at RHIC and LHC

Abstract

I review the colour dipole formulation of heavy quark production in the light of recent RHIC data. Since charm and bottom production directly probe the gluon density, these processes allow one to study shadowing and parton saturation at RHIC and LHC. The dipole approach provides a convenient framework to calculate these nuclear effects. I present numerical results for open charm and bottom production in proton–proton and proton–nucleus collisions and discuss transverse momentum broadening of heavy quarkonia.