Leptoproduction of heavy quarks. 1. General formalism and kinematics of charged current and neutral current production processes

Oct, 1993
27 pages
Published in:
  • Phys.Rev.D 50 (1994) 3085-3101
e-Print:
Report number:
  • MSUHEP-93-15,
  • SMU-HEP-93-16

Citations per year

1993200120092017202505101520
Abstract:
Existing calculations of heavy quark production in charged-current and neutral current lepton-hadron scattering are formulated differently because of the artificial distinction of ``light'' and ``heavy'' quarks made in the traditional approach. A proper QCD formalism valid for a wide kinematic range from near threshold to energies much higher then the quark mass should treat these processes in a uniform way. We formulate a unified approach to both types of leptoproduction processes based on the conventional factorization theorem. In this paper, we present the general framework with complete kinematics appropriate for arbitrary masses, emphasizing the simplifications provided by the helicity formalism. We illustrate this approach with an explicit calculation of the leading order contribution to the quark structure functions with general masses. This provides the basis for a complete QCD analysis of charged current and neutral current leptoproduction of charm and bottom quarks to be presented in subsequent papers.
  • lepton hadron: deep inelastic scattering
  • deep inelastic scattering: lepton hadron
  • hard scattering
  • heavy quark
  • quark: leptoproduction
  • leptoproduction: quark
  • neutral current
  • charged current
  • scattering amplitude
  • hadron: structure function
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