Heavy-quark production as a sensitive test for an improved description of high-energy hadron collisions

QCD dynamics at small quark and gluon momentum fractions or large total energy, which plays a major role for DESY HERA, the Fermilab Tevatron, BNL RHIC and CERN LHC physics, is still poorly understood. For one of the simplest processes, namely $b\overline{b}$ production, next-to-leading-order perturbation theory fails. We show that the combination of two recently developed theoretical concepts, the $k_{\perp }$ factorization and the next-to-leading-logarithmic-approximation Balitskiĭ-Fadin-Kuraev-Lipatov vertex, gives perfect agreement with data. One can therefore hope that these concepts provide a valuable foundation for the description of other high energy processes.