Heavy-quark pair-production in DIS at NLO QCD matched to a parton shower

Abstract

We present theoretical predictions for heavy-quark pair-production in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) at next-to-leading order (NLO) in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), matched to a parton shower in the POWHEG framework. We revisit the NLO heavy-quark pair-production cross section and implement a consistent matching to parton-shower evolution, with careful treatment of heavy-quark mass effects and the avoidance of double counting between fixed-order and parton-shower radiation. In addition, we compare the virtual NLO corrections available in the literature to one-loop amplitudes obtained through massification in the small-mass limit. This provides an independent validation of the virtual contributions. The study is presently restricted to the gluon-initiated channel, which dominates the kinematic region of interest at the HERA collider and remains important for the future Electron-Ion Collider.