Heavy quarks in deep-inelastic scattering

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive framework using the FONLL method to incorporate heavy quark mass effects into deep-inelastic scattering structure functions, achieving NNLO accuracy and analyzing phenomenological impacts.

Contribution

It introduces a general approach for heavy quark mass inclusion in structure functions, extending the FONLL method to NNLO and analyzing various prescriptions and their phenomenological implications.

Findings

Consistent NNLO expressions for heavy quark contributions are derived.

The impact of different prescriptions on structure functions is quantitatively analyzed.

Mass singularities in heavy quark coefficient functions are discussed.

Abstract

We discuss a general framework for the inclusion of heavy quark mass contributions to deep-inelastic structure functions and their perturbative matching to structure functions computed in variable-mass schemes. Our approach is based on the so-called FONLL method, previously introduced and applied to heavy quark hadroproduction and photoproduction. We define our framework, provide expressions up to second order in the strong coupling, and use them to construct matched expressions for structure functions up to NNLO. After checking explicitly the consistency of our results, we perform a study of the phenomenological impact of heavy quark terms, and compare results obtained at various perturbative orders, and with various prescriptions for the treatment of subleading terms, specifically those related to threshold behaviour. We also consider the heavy quark structure function F2c and discuss issues related to the presence of mass singularities in their coefficient functions.