Associated production of a Z boson and a single heavy-quark jet -: art. no. 074021

The leading-order process for the production of a Z boson and a heavy-quark jet at hadron colliders is gQ-->ZQ (Q=c,b). We calculate this cross section at next-to-leading order at the Fermilab Tevatron and the CERN LHC, and compare it with other sources of ZQ events. This process is a background to new physics, and can be used to measure the heavy-quark distribution function.