Producing heavy quark flavors in hadronic collisions—' A test of quantum chromodynamics

It is suggested, within the framework of QDC, that the production of heavy quark flavors in hardronic reactions proceeds via the materialization of a highly virtual gluon into a heavy quark-antiquark pair. Several phenomenological applications are discussed. In particular the charm production cross section at 400 GeV/c proton-nucleus collisions is calculated to be ? 120 nb/nucleon. Anti-proton-nucleon scattering is found to be especially suited for Ψ(J) and charm production, and provides an important and interesting test for the proposed production mechanism.