The influence of direct D-meson production on the determination of the nucleon strangeness asymmetry via dimuon events in neutrino experiments

Abstract

Experimentally, the production of oppositely charged dimuon events by neutrino and antineutrino deep inelastic scattering (DIS) is used to determine the strangeness asymmetry inside a nucleon. Here we point out that the direct production of a D-meson in DIS may have a substantial influence on the measurement of nucleon strangeness distributions. Direct D-meson production is via heavy quark recombination (HQR) and via light-quark fragmentation from perturbative QCD (LQF-P). To see the influence precisely, we compute the direct D-meson productions via HQR and LQF-P quantitatively and estimate their corrections to the analysis of the strangeness asymmetry. The results show that HQR has a stronger effect than LQF-P does, and the former may influence the experimental determination of the nucleon strangeness asymmetry.