Hadroproduction of quark flavors

We show that the extension of the conserved-vector-current hypothesis to gluons successfully describes the magnitude and energy dependence of the hadroproduction of strangeness, charm, and b, t flavors in their manifest ($K, D, B$) or hidden (φ, ψ, Υ) forms. We investigate the relation between the hadronic excitation of ψ and Υ particles for different assumptions regarding the quark structure of Υ. In our approach cross sections are simply obtained by rescaling experimental data on the production of virtual photons by αg²(M)α², where αg(M) is the quark-gluon coupling constant, varying with the gluon mass M in the sense of asymptotic freedom. We propose the powerful phenomenological tool that the total inclusive yield for producing flavor bound states scales in ΓM³ where M and Γ are respectively the mass and direct hadronic width of the state. We also show that the model successfully describes the relative production rates of dileptons (via ψ as well as "off-resonance") for different beam particles.