Higher order QCD corrections to charged-lepton deep-inelastic scattering and global fits of parton distributions

S Alekhin,S Moch

doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2009.01.004

S Alekhin, S Moch

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2009.01.004

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We study the perturbative QCD corrections to the heavy-quark structure functions of charged-lepton deep-inelastic scattering and their impact on global fits of parton distributions. We include the logarithmically enhanced terms near threshold due to soft gluon resummation in the QCD corrections at next-to-next-to-leading order. We demonstrate that this approximation is sufficient to describe the available HERA data in most parts of the kinematic region. The threshold-enhanced next-to-next-to-leading order corrections improve the agreement between predictions based on global fits of the parton distribution functions and the HERA collider data even in the small-x region.

Highlights

We study the perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) corrections to structure functions of charged-lepton deep-inelastic scattering and their impact on global fits of parton distributions
We focus on the production of heavy quarks, like e.g., charm, which proceeds within perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) predominantly through boson-gluon fusion [1, 2]
We focus on the impact of these approximate next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) corrections due to soft gluons and assess their impact on global fits of parton distribution functions (PDFs) in the fixed flavor number scheme (FFNS)

Summary

Introduction

We study the perturbative QCD corrections to structure functions of charged-lepton deep-inelastic scattering and their impact on global fits of parton distributions. We include higher order QCD corrections to DIS heavy-quark production and we wish to determine their impact on our information about the parton distribution functions (PDFs) and, especially, the gluon PDF. The coefficient functions in Eq (3) exhibit large double logarithms αsl ln2l β, with β = 1 − 4m2/s being the velocity of the heavy quark and these Sudakov logarithms can be resummed to all orders in perturbation theory.

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