Dimuon production in DIS with charm-mass effects

TL;DR

This paper advances the calculation of dimuon production in neutrino-nucleus collisions by incorporating charm-mass effects within a semi-inclusive framework, improving accuracy over previous approximations especially at low Q^2.

Contribution

It extends previous work by implementing a semi-inclusive charm production calculation in the SACOT-χ scheme to include charm-mass effects consistently.

Findings

Charm-mass effects modify previous calculations by up to 20% at small Q^2.

The new approach aligns well with theoretical expectations.

Improves the precision of strangeness constraints in PDF analyses.

Abstract

Dimuon production in neutrino-nucleus collisions, an important constraint of strangeness in global parton distribution function analyses, is typically calculated by assuming it to be proportional to inclusive charm production. This approach breaks down beyond fixed-flavor leading-order calculations. In our previous work, we introduced an alternative approach based on semi-inclusive charmed-hadron production to compute dimuon production directly. We now present an extension to this work, where we compute the semi-inclusive hadron production in the SACOT-$\chi$ general-mass variable-flavor number scheme to take all charm-mass effects consistently into account. The results are in line with our expectations, with the dynamical charm-mass effects modifying our previous approximative calculation by up to $20 \, \%$ at small values of $Q^2$.