Mellin Representation for the Heavy Flavor Contributions to Deep Inelastic Structure Functions

Abstract

We derive semi--analytic expressions for the analytic continuation of the Mellin transforms of the heavy flavor QCD coefficient functions for neutral current deep inelastic scattering in leading and next-to-leading order to complex values of the Mellin variable $N$. These representations are used in Mellin--space QCD evolution programs to provide fast evaluations of the heavy flavor contributions to the structure functions $F_2(x,Q^2), F_L(x,Q^2)$ and $g_1(x,Q^2)$.