Next-to-Leading Order QCD Corrections to Charged Current Charm Production and the Unpolarized and Polarized Strange Sea at HERA

TL;DR

This paper calculates next-to-leading order QCD corrections for charged current charm production at HERA, aiming to improve measurements of strange sea quark distributions, including polarized cases, despite experimental challenges.

Contribution

It provides the first calculation of spin-dependent MSbar coefficient functions for charm production at NLO, enhancing the theoretical framework for strange sea measurements.

Findings

Decent unpolarized strange sea measurement is feasible with high luminosity.

Polarized measurements are challenging due to low charm detection efficiency.

Theoretical calculations improve understanding of strange quark contributions in nucleons.

Abstract

Charged current charm and D meson production is studied in detail as a means of determining the unpolarized and polarized strange sea densities at HERA. All analyses are performed in next-to-leading order QCD, including a calculation of the so far unknown spin-dependent MSbar coefficient functions up to O(alpha_s). It is shown that a decent measurement is possible in the unpolarized case, provided a sufficient luminosity can be reached in the future, while for longitudinally polarized beams it appears to be extremely challenging due to limitations imposed on the expected statistical accuracy by the charm detection efficiency.