NLO production and decay of quarkonium

We present a calculation of next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to total hadronic production cross sections and to light-hadron-decay rates of heavy quarkonium states. Both colour-singlet and colour-octet contributions are included. We discuss in detail the use of covariant projectors in dimensional regularization, the structure of soft-gluon emission and the overall finiteness of radiative corrections. We compare our approach with the NLO version of the threshold expansion technique recently introduced by Braaten and Chen. Most of the results presented here are new. Others represent the first independent reevaluation of calculations already known in the literature. In this case a comparison with previous findings is reported. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.