Measurement of D mesons Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Abstract

Charm production in deep inelastic scattering has been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 82 pb^{-1}. Charm has been tagged by reconstructing D^{*+}, D^0, D^{+} and D_s^+ (+ c.c.) charm mesons. The charm hadrons were measured in the kinematic range p_T(D^{*+},D^0,D^{+}) > 3 GeV, p_T(D_s^+)>2 GeV and |\eta(D)| < 1.6 for 1.5 < Q^2 < 1000 GeV^2 and 0.02 < y < 0.7. The production cross sections were used to extract charm fragmentation ratios and the fraction of c quarks hadronising into a particular charm meson in the kinematic range considered. The cross sections were compared to the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD, and extrapolated to the full kinematic region in p_T(D) and \eta(D) in order to determine the open-charm contribution, F_2^{c\bar{c}}(x,Q^2), to the proton structure function F_2.