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Relating parton model and color dipole formulation of heavy quark hadroproduction

At high center of mass energies, hadroproduction of heavy quarks can be expressed in terms of the same color dipole cross section as low Bjorken-x deep inelastic scattering. We show analytically that at leading order, the dipole formulation is equivalent to the gluon-gluon fusion mechanism of the conventional parton model. In phenomenological application, we employ a parameterization of the dipole cross section which also includes higher order and saturation effects, thereby going beyond the parton model. Numerical calculations in the dipole approach agree well with experimental data on open charm production over a wide range of energy. Dipole approach and next to leading order parton model yield similar values for open charm production, but for open bottom production, the dipole approach tends to predict somewhat higher cross sections than the parton model.