Consistent treatment of charm evolution in deep inelastic scattering

Dec, 1996
17 pages
Published in:
  • Eur.Phys.J.C 2 (1998) 287-300
e-Print:
Report number:
  • DTP-96-102,
  • RAL-TR-96-103

Citations per year

199620022008201420200510152025
Abstract:
We present a formulation which allows heavy quark (c, b, ...) mass effects to be explicitly incorporated in both the coefficient functions and the splitting functions in the parton evolution equations. We obtain a consistent procedure for evolution through the threshold regions for c anti-c and b anti-b production in deep inelastic scattering, which allows the prediction of the charm and bottom quark densities. We use the new formulation to perform a next-to-leading order global parton analysis of deep inelastic and related hard scattering data. We give predictions for the charm components of the proton structure functions F_2 and F_L as functions of x and Q~2. We examine the Q~2 range of validity of the photon-gluon fusion model for c anti-c electroproduction. We emphasize the value of a precision measurement of the charm component F_2~c at HERA.
  • electron p: deep inelastic scattering
  • p: structure function
  • effect: charm
  • model: parton
  • quark: momentum spectrum
  • bottom
  • charm
  • quark: mass
  • quark: pair production
  • structure function: longitudinal