Consistent Treatment of Charm Evolution in Deep Inelastic Scattering

Abstract

We present a formulation which allows heavy quark (c, b, ...) mass effects to be explicitly incorporated in both the coefficient functions and the splitting functions in the parton evolution equations. We obtain a consistent procedure for evolution through the threshold regions for c anti-c and b anti-b production in deep inelastic scattering, which allows the prediction of the charm and bottom quark densities. We use the new formulation to perform a next-to-leading order global parton analysis of deep inelastic and related hard scattering data. We find that the optimum fit has alpha_S(M_Z^2) = 0.118. We give predictions for the charm components of the proton structure functions F_2 and F_L as functions of x and Q^2 and, in particular, find that F_2^c is in good agreement with the existing measurements. We examine the Q^2 range of validity of the photon-gluon fusion model for c anti-c electroproduction. We emphasize the value of a precision measurement of the charm component F_2^c at HERA.

22 pages (latex), 9 postscript figures. In this revised version of the paper we take a different choice of evolution scale. Rather than the "physically natural" scale used in the original version of the paper, we now choose the scale so that it reproduces the MSbar scheme for Q^2 >> m_c^2. The global analysis of the data is repeated for this choice of evolution scale