Heavy-quark production by hadrons: Gluon jet fragmentation versus fusion

We show that at $\text{p}\text{p}$ collider energies heavy quarks are dominantly produced by the fragmentation of gluon jets into $\text{Q}\text{Q}$ with Q = c,b. This is because the underlying gg → gg jet cross section exceeds the fusion process $\text{gg → Q}\text{Q}$ by over two orders of magnitude. We compute the perturbative contribution to the gluon fragmentation from 2 → 3 processes such as gg $\text{→ gQ}\text{Q}$. We point out the observable consequences for single-lepton production and same-opposite charge dileptons. In particular, the observed production of dileptons with large p_T and low effective mass is explained.