Heavy Flavor Production at HERA

TL;DR

This paper reports on charm and beauty quark production measurements at HERA, comparing experimental data with advanced QCD calculations, and analyzing their contributions to the proton structure function.

Contribution

It provides new measurements of heavy flavor production at HERA and compares them with next-to-leading and next-to-next-to-leading order QCD predictions.

Findings

Measured cross sections agree with NNLO calculations within errors.

Charm and beauty contributions to the proton structure function are quantified.

Data from HERA-I and HERA-II are combined for comprehensive analysis.

Abstract

Studies of charm and beauty production in ep collisions with a center-of-mass energy of 318 GeV are reported from the two HERA collaborations, H1 and ZEUS. The analyses make use of both the HERA-I data sample recorded between 1996 and 2000 and a sample from HERA-II, which started in 2003. The cross sections measured by both H1 and ZEUS experiments are compared with next-to-leading order QCD calculations. The measurement of the charm and beauty contributions to the proton structure function is also presented. The comparison to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) calculations shows agreement within the errors.