  After inserting the heavy quark mass dependence into QCD partonic evolution
equations, we determine the mean charged hadron multiplicity and second
multiplicity correlators of jets produced in high energy collisions. We thereby
extend the so-called dead cone effect to the phenomenology of multiparticle
production in QCD jets and find that the average multiplicity of heavy-quark
initiated jets decreases significantly as compared to the massless case, even
taking into account the weak decay products of the leading primary quark. We
emphasize the relevance of our study as a complementary check of $b$-tagging
techniques at hadron colliders like the Tevatron and the LHC.
