Measurement of D^\pm production in deep inelastic ep scattering with the ZEUS detector at HERA

TL;DR

This paper reports on the measurement of D+ meson production in deep inelastic ep scattering at HERA, providing data to test QCD predictions and extract the charm contribution to the proton structure function.

Contribution

First measurement of D+ meson production in deep inelastic ep scattering with detailed differential cross sections and comparison to NLO QCD predictions.

Findings

Measured differential cross sections for D+ production.

Compared data with NLO QCD predictions.

Extracted charm contribution to proton structure function.

Abstract

Charm production in deep inelastic ep scattering was measured with the ZEUS detector using an integrated luminosity of 354 pb^{-1}. Charm quarks were identified by reconstructing D^{+} mesons in the D^{+} -> K^{-} pi^{+} pi^{+} decay channel. Lifetime information was used to reduce combinatorial background substantially. Differential cross sections were measured in the kinematic region 5 < Q^{2} < 1000 GeV^{2}, 0.02 < y < 0.7, 1.5 < p_{T}(D^{+}) < 15 GeV and |eta(D^{+})| < 1.6, where Q^{2} is the photon virtuality, y is the inelasticity, and p_{T}(D^{+}) and eta(D^{+}) are the transverse momentum and the pseudorapidity of the D^{+} meson, respectively. Next-to-leading-order QCD predictions are compared to the data. The charm contribution, F_{2}^{cc}, to the proton structure-function F_{2} was extracted.