NLL resummation of the heavy-quark hadroproduction cross-section

We compute the effect of soft-gluon resummation, at the next-to-leading-logarithmic level, in the hadroproduction cross section for heavy flavours. Applications to top, bottom and charm total cross sections are discussed. We find in general that the corrections to the fixed next-to-leading-order results are larger for larger renormalization scales, and small, or even negative, for smaller scales. This leads to a significant reduction of the scale dependence of the results, for most experimental configurations of interest. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.