Matching NLO QCD and parton showers in heavy flavour production

We apply the MC@NLO approach to the process of heavy flavour hadroproduction.MC@NLO is a method for matching next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD calculationsand parton shower Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, with the following features:fully exclusive events are generated, with hadronisation according to the MCmodel; total rates are accurate to NLO; NLO results for distributions arerecovered upon expansion in $\as$; hard emissions are treated as in NLOcomputations while soft/collinear emissions are handled by the MC simulation,with the same logarithmic accuracy as the MC; matching between the hard andsoft regions is smooth, and no intermediate integration steps are necessary.The method was applied previously to the hadroproduction of gauge boson pairs,which at NLO involves only initial-state QCD radiation and a unique colourstructure. In heavy flavour production, it is necessary to includecontributions from final-state QCD radiation and different colour flows. Wepresent illustrative results on top and bottom production at the Tevatron andLHC.Comment: 70 pages Latex; 38 figures included. Minor modifications to the text, units in figs. 7,8,10,11 correcte