Running heavy-quark masses in DIS

Abstract

We report on determinations of the running mass for charm quarks from deep-inelastic scattering reactions. The method provides complementary information on this fundamental parameter from hadronic processes with space-like kinematics. The obtained values are consistent with but systematically lower than the world average as published by the PDG. We also address the consequences of the running mass scheme for heavy-quark parton distributions in global fits to deep-inelastic scattering data.

Figures (1)

• Figure 1: Left: The data on the charm structure function $F_2^{c{\bar{c}}}$ by the H1 collaboration Aaron:2011gp in comparison with the running-mass scheme predictions of ref. Alekhin:2010sv. Right: The $b$-quark PDF uncertainties obtained in the global fits: The dotted (red) lines denote the $\pm 1 \sigma$ band of relative uncertainties (in percent) and the solid (red) line indicates the difference in the central prediction resulting from the change of the mass scheme and using $m_b(m_b) = 4.19~$GeV (bottom). For comparison the shaded (grey) area represents the uncertainties in the ABKM fit Alekhin:2009ni.