Heavy Quark Production in CC and NC DIS and The Structure of Real and Virtual Photons in NLO QCD

Abstract

This thesis consists of two parts. In the first part heavy quark production in neutral current and charged current DIS is studied within the variable flavor number scheme of Aivazis, Collins, Olness, and Tung (ACOT). For this purpose all the relevant partonic subprocesses have been calculated to order O(α_s^1) for general masses and couplings taking into account massive initial state quark-partons as needed in the variable flavor number scheme of ACOT. By the calculation of the before missing radiative corrections to scattering amplitudes on massive quark partons the ACOT scheme could be completed to full order O(α_s^1). These results might also prove useful for studying the intrinsic charm content of nucleons. In the second part the parton content of pions and real and virtual photons is analyzed in leading order (LO) and next-to-leading oder (NLO) QCD within the framework of the radiative parton model of Glück, Reya, and Vogt (GRV). Furthermore, the factorization of the cross section for the process e^+ e^- -> e^+ e^- X into fluxes of transverse/longitudinal target photons and the cross sections for deep inelastic scattering off these target photons is investigated in detail. It is demonstrated that the factorization remains valid also for virtual P^2 \= 0 target photons in the Bjorken limit P^2 << Q^2. However, the neglected terms are of the order O(\sqrt{P^2/Q^2}) only and not of the order O(P^2/Q^2) as might have been naively expected. Finally, the photon structure functions have been calculated in lowest order perturbation theory according to the doubly virtual box γ^*(P^2) γ^*(Q^2) -> q \bar{q}. A useful compilation of various limits of these general expressions is provided.