Production cross section of heavy quarks in ep interaction at the NLO approximation

TL;DR

This paper calculates the heavy quark production cross sections in electron-proton collisions at NLO, compares with experimental data, and predicts top quark production cross section.

Contribution

It provides a detailed NLO calculation of heavy quark cross sections using structure functions and compares results with existing experimental data and PDFs.

Findings

Charm and beauty cross sections agree with HERA data.

Predicted top quark production cross section at high energies.

Cross sections vary with center-of-mass energy.

Abstract

We present the production cross section of heavy quarks \sigma^{cc}, \sigma^{bb} and {\sigma^{tt}} at the next-to-leading order in the electron-proton interaction by using the quarks and gluon distribution functions at the initial scale Q^{2}_{0}. To do this, we use a fitted form of the heavy quark coefficient functions for deep-inelastic lepton-hadron scattering to obtain the structure functions of heavy quarks. Then, we calculate the reduced cross section of heavy quarks by using the structure functions and subsequently present the single differential and the integrated cross section of heavy quarks at the center-of-mass energies of 319 GeV , 1.3 TeV and 3.5 TeV in the electron-proton collision. The obtained numerical results of the cross section of the charm and beauty quarks are compared with the HERA data, which is a combination from the results of the H1 and ZEUS detectors, and with the predictions from H1PDF, MSTW2008 and MSRT03. Furthermore, we present the production cross section of top quark as a direct prediction from our calculations.