Heavy-quark production in deep-inelastic scattering

TL;DR

This paper discusses recent experimental and theoretical advances in heavy-quark electro-production within the ABM11 PDF framework, including precise charm quark mass determinations at NNLO and NLO, and compares different VFN scheme prescriptions.

Contribution

It provides updated charm quark mass values from HERA data and analyzes uncertainties in the variable-flavor-number scheme.

Findings

Charm quark mass m_c(m_c)=1.24 +- 0.03 (exp) +0.03/-0.02 (scale) at NNLO.

Charm quark mass m_c(m_c)=1.15 +- 0.04 (exp) +0.04/-0.00 (scale) at NLO.

Discussion of VFN scheme uncertainties in PDF matching.

Abstract

We report recent experimental and theoretical progress concerning the heavy-quark electro-production in the context of the ABM11 parton distribution function (PDF) fit. In the updated ABM11 analysis, including the recent combined HERA charm data, the MSbar-values of the c-quark mass m_c(m_c)=1.24 +- 0.03 (exp)\,^{+0.03}_{-0.02}(scale)\,^{+0.00}_{-0.07} (th) and m_c(m_c)=1.15\, +- 0.04 (exp)\,^{+0.04}_{-0.00} (scale) are determined at NNLO and NLO, respectively. The values of m_c obtained are compared to other determinations including the ones based on the various variable-flavor-number (VFN) scheme prescriptions.The VFN scheme uncertainties related to the matching of the 4(5)-flavor PDFs with the 3(4)-flavor ones are discussed.