Systematics of heavy quark production in high energy electron-proton collisions.

Abstract

We discuss heavy quark and quarkonium production in various kinematic regions at the HERA ep collider. In contrast to fixed target experiments, collider kinematics allows the possibility of detailed measurements of particle production in the proton fragmentation region. One thus can study parton correlations in the proton Fock states materialized by the virtual photon probe. We discuss various configurations of inelastic electron-proton scattering, including peripheral, diffractive and deep inelastic processes. In particular, we show that intrinsic heavy quark Fock states can be identified by the observation of quarkonium production at large ${\mathit{x}}_{\mathit{F}}$ and at a low mean transverse momentum which is insensitive to the virtuality ${\mathit{Q}}^{2}$ of the photon.