Abstract
Inclusive production of D*± (2010) mesons in deep inelastic scattering has been measured with the ZEUS detector at DESY HERA using an integrated luminosity of 81.9 pb−1. The decay channel D*+→D0π+ with D0→K−π+ and corresponding antiparticle decay were used to identify D* mesons. Differential D* cross sections with 1.5<Q2<1000GeV2 and 0.02<y<0.7 in the kinematic region 1.5<pT(D*)<15GeV and |η(D*)|<1.5 are compared to different QCD calculations incorporating different parametrizations of the parton densities in the proton. The data show sensitivity to the gluon distribution in the proton and are reasonably well described by next-to-leading-order QCD with the ZEUS NLO QCD fit used as the input parton density in the proton. The observed cross section is extrapolated to the full kinematic region in pT(D*) and η(D*) in order to determine the open-charm contribution, F2cc¯(x,Q2), to the proton structure function, F2. Since, at low Q2, the uncertainties of the data are comparable to those from the QCD fit, the measured differential cross sections in y and Q2 should be used in future fits to constrain the gluon density.Received 1 September 2003DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.69.012004©2004 American Physical Society
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