Heavy flavour production in ep collisions at HERA

Abstract

Heavy flavour quarks in ep collisions are produced mostly from pair-production through a fusion of a virtual photon and a gluon from the proton. Therefore, the production cross sections provide information on the gluon distribution in the proton. The presence of a hard scale from the heavy quark mass, in principle, ensures that the cross sections are calculable through pQCD. Measurements in ep collisions, however, show that the calculations reasonably agree with the data in general, but underestimate the cross sections in some regions of phase space.

Summary talk for ISMD 06

“…One of course has to choose infrared safe observables, and for many jet computations one typically uses Monte-Carlo fragmentation models. In the presentation by Keramidas, the cross section predicted by NLO pQCD was shown to describe well the D production data in deep inelastic scattering measured by Zeus [8]. In the presentation by Mesropian, CDF jet production was compared to pQCD computations [9].…”