General heavy-flavor mass scheme for charged-current DIS at NNLO and beyond

Abstract

Incompleteness in current knowledge of neutrino interactions with nuclear matter imposes a primary limitation in searches for leptonic CP violation carried out at long-baseline neutrino experiments. In this paper, we present a new computation that elevates the theoretical accuracy to next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) in QCD for charged-current deeply-inelastic scattering (DIS) processes relevant for ongoing and future neutrino programs. Mass-dependent quark contributions are consistently included across a wide range of momentum transfers in the SACOT-$\chi$ general-mass scheme. When appropriate, we further include N$^3$LO corrections in the zero-mass scheme. We show theoretical predictions for several experiments with neutrinos over a wide range of energies and at the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider. Our prediction reduces perturbative uncertainties to $\sim\!1\%$, sufficient for the high-precision objectives of future charged-current DIS measurements, and provides important theoretical inputs to experimental studies of leptonic mixing and CP violations.