Charm Production in ep-Collisions

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent experimental results on charm quark production in electron-proton collisions at HERA, comparing measurements with theoretical predictions and exploring charm's role in proton structure.

Contribution

It provides new insights into charm fragmentation, production mechanisms, and the charm contribution to the proton structure function at HERA.

Findings

Charm production measurements agree with NLO QCD calculations.

Charm fragmentation functions are consistent with e+e- collider data.

Inclusive D* meson and associated production data support perturbative QCD models.

Abstract

Recent results on the production of open charm in electron proton scattering at HERA are reviewed. Results on the fragmentation of charm are presented and compared to the measurements at e+e- colliders. Recent results on the charm contribution to the proton structure function F2 are shown. Furthermore, measurements of inclusive D* meson, D*+jet and D*+muon production are presented. These results are compared with perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-leading order as well as with Monte Carlo predictions.