Heavy quark production as 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 HERA, the Tevatron, RHIC and LHC physics, is still poorly understood. For one of the simplest processes, namely bottom-antibottom 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 BFKL 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.