Measurement of D*± meson production and determination of F2cc̄ at low Q2 in deep-inelastic scattering at HERA

Abstract

Inclusive production of D * mesons in deep-inelastic ep scattering at HERA is studied in the range 5 <100 GeV2 of the photon virtuality and 0.02 1.25 GeV and {pipe}η(D *){pipe}<1.8. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 348 pb-1 collected with the H1 detector. Single and double differential cross sections are measured and the charm contribution F2cc̄ to the proton structure function F 2 is determined. The results are compared to perturbative QCD predictions at next-to-leading order implementing different schemes for the charm mass treatment and with Monte Carlo models based on leading order matrix elements with parton showers. © 2011 The Author(s).