Determination of the charm-quark mass in the MS-bar scheme using charm production data from deep inelastic scattering at HERA

TL;DR

This paper measures the charm-quark mass in the MS-bar scheme using deep-inelastic scattering data from HERA, providing results consistent with the world average and offering a complementary approach to hadronic process analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel determination of the charm-quark mass using space-like kinematics from HERA data, with results comparable to existing measurements.

Findings

Charm-quark mass at NLO: 1.27 GeV with uncertainties

Charm-quark mass at approximate NNLO: 1.36 GeV with uncertainties

Results align with the world average and demonstrate the method's validity

Abstract

We determine the charm-quark mass mc(mc) in the MS-bar scheme using measurements of charm production in deep-inelastic ep scattering at HERA in the kinematic range of photon virtuality from 5 to 1000 GeV squared and Bjorken scaling variable from 0.0001 to 0.5. The extraction of charm quark mass from this process with space-like kinematics provides complementary information to results from hadronic processes. The QCD analysis of the HERA data yields a value of mc(mc) of 1.27 plus minus 0.05(exp) plus 0.06 minus 0.01(scale) GeV at next-to-leading order and mc(mc) of 1.36 plus minus 0.04(exp) plus 0.04 minus 0.00 (scale) plus minus 0.1(theory) GeV at approximate next-to-next-to-leading order. The results are consistent with and of comparable precision as the world average.