Heavy particle production in high-energy hadron collisions

We consider the problem of how to compute the cross section for producing heavy strongly interacting particles (quarks, gluinos, squarks ...) in high-energy hadron collisions, supposing that the heavy particle masses are large compared to 1 GeV. We use heavy quark production as an example. We consider several low-order graphs in the kinematic region expected to produce the bulk of the total production cross section. Based on the structure of the low-order graphs, we argue that the cross section can be reliably computed in QCD by using the same factorization formula that is used for jet production and W and Z production, but inserting the appropriate parton level cross sections for the heavy particle production. We emphasize that an analysis at all orders of perturbation theory is needed to reliably establish this conjecture.