Heavy-quark correlations in deep-inelastic electroproduction

TL;DR

This work delivers a complete next-to-leading order calculation of exclusive virtual-photon–parton cross sections for heavy-quark production in deep-inelastic scattering, enabling study of correlations among the heavy quark, antiquark, and an accompanying jet. Using a subtraction method to isolate soft and collinear singularities, the authors obtain finite, four-dimensional results for the gamma*-parton processes and integrate them with modern PDFs to predict hadronic structure functions F2 and FL, as well as new exclusive distributions in dijet kinematics. They validate their calculations against prior results, quantify scale sensitivity, and demonstrate rich, jet-aware observables for charm and bottom production at HERA, including the Pt spectrum, azimuthal correlations, and cone-size distributions, while also highlighting regions where fixed-order predictions break down and NNLO or resummation may be needed. The associated numerical program provides exclusive event information suitable for applying experimental cuts, facilitating direct tests of perturbative QCD in DIS heavy-quark production without photon structure complications.

Abstract

We have completed the next-to-leading order perturbative QCD corrections to the virtual-photon exclusive differential cross sections for heavy quark production in deep-inelastic electron-proton scattering, i.e. $e + P \rightarrow Q + \overline{Q} + X$. Using these results, we have computed distributions which are sensitive to correlations among the heavy quark, the heavy antiquark, and the associated jet. Some predictions for charm and bottom heavy quark production at the electron-proton collider HERA are presented.