Longitudinally Polarized Photoproduction of Heavy Flavors at Next-to-Leading Order of QCD

TL;DR

This paper provides a detailed NLO QCD analysis of charm quark photoproduction in polarized lepton-hadron collisions, including direct and resolved photon contributions, and compares results with COMPASS data on D0 meson asymmetries.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible Monte Carlo program for spin-dependent heavy flavor production, extending it to include both direct and resolved photon processes, and models hadronization for comparison with experimental data.

Findings

NLO corrections significantly impact spin asymmetries.

Hard subprocesses' roles are clarified in charm production.

Theoretical uncertainties are quantified through scale and hadronization parameter variations.

Abstract

We present a phenomenological study of charm quark photoproduction in longitudinally polarized lepton-hadron collisions at next-to-leading order accuracy of QCD. Our results are based on a recently developed, flexible parton-level Monte Carlo program for spin-dependent heavy flavor hadroproduction, which we extend to deal also with both direct and resolved photon contributions. The subsequent hadronization into charmed mesons is modeled in our calculations, which allows us to compare with data on double-spin asymmetries for D0 meson production taken by the COMPASS collaboration. In general, next-to-leading order QCD corrections are found to be very significant and do not cancel in spin asymmetries. We elucidate the role of the individual hard scattering subprocesses and determine the range of parton momentum fractions predominantly probed for charm production at COMPASS. Theoretical uncertainties are estimated by varying renormalization and factorization scales and parameters controlling the hadronization of the charm quarks.