Abstract
We study charm production in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) using the xFitter framework. Recent results from the LHC have focused renewed attention on the determination of the strange-quark parton distribution function (PDF), and the DIS charm process provides important complementary constraints on this quantity. We examine the current PDF uncertainty and use LHeC pseudodata to estimate the potential improvement from this proposed facility. As xFitter implements both fixed-flavor- and variable-flavor-number schemes, we can compare the impact of these different theoretical choices; this highlights some interesting aspects of multi-scale calculations. We find that the high-statistics LHeC data covering a wide kinematic range could substantially reduce the strange PDF uncertainty.
Highlights
In the Standard Model (SM), the charm quark plays an important role in the investigation of the nucleon structure [6,7,8,9]
We find that the high-statistics Large Hadron Electron Collider (LHeC) data covering a wide kinematic range could substantially reduce the strange parton distribution function (PDF) uncertainty
They found that the resummed contributions in the variable-flavor-number scheme (VFNS) yielded a larger cross section than the fixed-flavor number scheme (FFNS), and that for Q2 scales more than a few times the quark mass, the differences due to scheme choice exceeded the differences due to higher-order contributions
Summary
Theoretical predictions are calculated for electroweak charged-current (CC) charm prod√uction in ep collisions at the LHeC at centre-of-mass energy s = 1.3 TeV, using a variety of heavy-flavor schemes. The predictions are provided for unpolarized beams in the kinematic range 100 < Q2 < 100000 GeV2, 0.0001 < xBj < 0.25. They are calculated as reduced cross sections at different Q2, xBj and inelasticity (y) points. CC production of charm quarks in the final state can happen via both electroweak and QCD processes. Three different heavy-flavor schemes are employed, all including a full treatment of charm-mass effects up to NLO, i.e. O(αs); in the following we describe them in detail for the particular application to CC electronproton reactions
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