Observation of neutral current charm production in $\nu_{\mu}Fe$ scattering at the Tevatron

TL;DR

This paper reports the first observation of neutral current charm production in neutrino scattering, confirming theoretical models and providing new measurements of charm production cross sections and effective charm mass.

Contribution

It presents the first detection of open charm in neutral current neutrino interactions and introduces new measurements of charm production cross sections and effective charm mass.

Findings

Charm production rate consistent with gluon-Z0 boson model

New measurement of proton-nucleon charm production cross section

Determination of effective charm mass

Abstract

We report on the first observation of open charm production in neutral current deep inelastic neutrino scattering as seen in the NuTeV detector at Fermilab. The production rate is shown to be consistent with a pure gluon-$% Z^{0}$ boson production model, and the observed level of charm production is used to determine the effective charm mass. As part of our analysis, we also obtain a new measurement for the proton-nucleon charm production cross section at $\sqrt{s}=38.8$ GeV.