Measurement of $ D^{*\pm}$ production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

TL;DR

This paper measures $D^{* extpm}$ meson production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA, comparing results to QCD predictions and extracting the charm contribution to proton structure functions.

Contribution

It provides new differential cross section measurements of $D^{* extpm}$ production and compares them to NLO QCD calculations, enhancing understanding of charm in proton structure.

Findings

Measured differential cross sections for $D^{* extpm}$ production.

Compared experimental results with NLO QCD calculations.

Extracted the charm contribution to proton structure functions.

Abstract

The production of $D^{*\pm}$ mesons in deep inelastic $ep$ scattering has been measured for exchanged photon virtualities $ 5<Q^2<1000 \gev^2 $, using an integrated luminosity of 363 pb$^{-1}$ with the ZEUS detector at HERA. Differential cross sections have been measured and compared to next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The cross-sections are used to extract the charm contribution to the proton structure functions, expressed in terms of the reduced charm cross section, $\sigma_{\rm red}^{c\bar{c}}$. Theoretical calculations based on fits to inclusive HERA data are compared to the results.