Heavy Quark Production in the ACOT Scheme beyond NLO

TL;DR

This paper advances the calculation of heavy quark structure functions by combining exact NLO ACOT results with higher-order massless approximations, enabling more accurate predictions at NNLO and N3LO.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate higher-order mass effects in the ACOT scheme using massless Wilson coefficients and rescaling, extending the scheme beyond NLO.

Findings

Massless Wilson coefficients with rescaling effectively approximate heavy quark mass effects.

Combining NLO ACOT with higher-order massless results provides a good approximation at NNLO and N3LO.

Numerical results confirm the dominance of mass effects can be captured with this approach.

Abstract

We compute the structure functions F2 and FL in the ACOT scheme for heavy quark production. We use the complete ACOT results to NLO, and make use of the MSbar massless results at NNLO and N3LO to estimate the higher order mass-dependent corrections. We show numerically that the dominant heavy quark mass effects can be taken into account using massless Wilson coefficients together with an appropriate rescaling prescription. Combining the exact NLO ACOT scheme with these expressions should provide a good approximation to the full calculation in the ACOT scheme at NNLO and N3LO.