This report reviews the study of open heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in high-energy hadronic collisions, as tools to investigate fundamental aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics, from the...

We highlight the progress, current status, and open challenges of QCD-driven physics, in theory and in experiment. We discuss how the strong interaction is intimately connected to a broad sweep of physical problems, in settings ranging from astrophysics and cosmology to strongly coupled, complex systems in particle and condensed-matter physics, as well as to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. We also discuss how success in describing the strong interaction impacts other fields, and, in turn, how such subjects can impact studies of the strong interaction. In the course of the work we offer a perspective on the many research streams which flow into and out of QCD, as well as a vision for future developments.

We make up-to-date QCD predictions for open charm and bottom production at RHIC in nucleon-nucleon collisions at $\sqrt{S}=200\mathrm{GeV}$. We also calculate the electron spectrum resulting from heavy flavor decays to allow direct comparison to the data. A rigorous benchmark, including the theoretical uncertainties, is established against which nuclear collision data can be compared to obtain evidence for nuclear effects.