Combination and QCD analysis of charm and beauty production cross-section measurements in deep inelastic $ep$ scattering at HERA

TL;DR

This paper combines charm and beauty production cross-section measurements from HERA's deep inelastic scattering data, compares them with perturbative QCD calculations, and performs a QCD analysis to determine the running quark masses.

Contribution

It provides a combined dataset of charm and beauty cross sections and extracts the charm and beauty quark masses using next-to-leading order QCD analysis.

Findings

Combined cross-section measurements with correlated uncertainties.

Comparison of data with perturbative QCD calculations.

Determination of charm and beauty quark masses.

Abstract

Measurements of open charm and beauty production cross sections in deep inelastic $ep$ scattering at HERA from the H1 and ZEUS Collaborations are combined. Reduced cross sections are obtained in the kinematic range of negative four-momentum transfer squared of the photon $2.5$ GeV$^2<Q^2<2000$ GeV$^2$ and Bjorken scaling variable $3\cdot10^{-5}<x_{\text{Bj}}<5\cdot10^{-2}$. The combination method accounts for the correlations of the statistical and systematic uncertainties among the different datasets. Perturbative QCD calculations are compared to the combined data. A next-to-leading order QCD analysis is performed using these data together with the combined inclusive deep inelastic scattering cross sections from HERA. The running charm- and beauty-quark masses are determined as $m_c(m_c) = 1.290^{+0.046}_{-0.041}\text{(exp/fit)}^{+0.062}_{-0.014}\text{(model)}^{+0.003}_{-0.031}\text{(parameterisation)}$ GeV and $m_b(m_b) = 4.049^{+0.104}_{-0.109}\text{(exp/fit)}^{+0.090}_{-0.032}\text{(model)}^{+0.001}_{-0.031} \text{(parameterisation)}$~GeV.