Measurement of D*+- production in deep inelastic ep scattering at HERA

ZEUS Collaboration

Paper

Measurement of D*+- production in deep inelastic ep scattering at HERA

Abstract

Inclusive production of

mesons in deep inelastic scattering has been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 81.9 pb

. The decay channel

with

and corresponding antiparticle decay were used to identify

mesons. Differential

cross sections with

GeV

and

in the kinematic region

GeV and

are compared to different QCD calculations incorporating different parameterisations of the parton densities in the proton. The data show sensitivity to the gluon distribution in the proton and are reasonably well described by next-to-leading-order QCD with the ZEUS NLO QCD fit used as the input parton density in the proton. The observed cross section is extrapolated to the full kinematic region in

and

in order to determine the open-charm contribution,

, to the proton structure function,

. Since, at low

, the uncertainties of the data are comparable to those from the QCD fit, the measured differential cross sections in

and

should be used in future fits to constrain the gluon density.