Measurement of D*+- production and the charm contribution to F2 in deep inelastic scattering at HERA.

The ZEUS collaboration Breitweg, J. ; Chekanov, S. ; Derrick, M. ; et al.
Eur.Phys.J.C 12 (2000) 35-52, 2000.
Inspire Record 505056 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.43895

The production of D*+-(2010) mesons in deep inelastic scattering has been measured in the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 37 pb^-1. The decay channels D*+ -> D0 pi+(+c.c.), with D0 -> K- pi+ or D0 ->K- pi- pi+ pi+, have been used to identify the D mesons. The e+p cross section for inclusive D*+- production with 1<Q^2<600 GeV^2 and 0.02<y<0.7 is 8.31 +- 0.31(stat.) +0.30-0.50(syst.) nb in the kinematic region 1.5< pT(D*+-)<15 GeV and |eta(D*+-)|<1.5. Differential cross sections are consistent with a next-to-leading-order perturbative-QCD calculation when using charm-fragmentation models which take into account the interaction of the charm quark with the proton remnant. The observed cross section is extrapolated to the full kinematic region in pT(D*+-) and eta(D*+-) in order to determine the charm contribution, F^ccbar_2(x,Q^2), to the proton structure function. The ratio F^ccbar_2/F_2 rises from ~10% at Q^2 ~1.8 GeV^2 to ~30% at Q^2 ~130 GeV^2 for x values in the range 10^-4 to 10-3.

22 data tables

The measured cross section for D* production. The first is derived from theK2PI final state and the second from the K4PI final state.

The differential cross section w.r.t. Q**2 from the K2PI final state. The asymmetric errors are the quadratic sum of the statistical and systematic errors. The statistical errors are also shown separately.

The differential cross section w.r.t. X from the K2PI final state. The asymmetric errors are the quadratic sum of the statistical and systematic errors. The statistical errors are also shown separately.

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