Differential Distributions for Heavy Flavour Production at HERA

Abstract

We compute pseudorapidity and transverse momentum distributions for charm and bottom production at HERA. We examine the effect of next-to-leading order QCD corrections, the effect of possible intrinsic transverse momenta of the incoming partons, and of fragmentation. We compare our results with full Monte Carlo simulation using HERWIG. The importance of the hadronic component of the photon is also studied. We examine the possibility to distinguish among different parametrizations of the photon parton densities using charm production data, and the possibilty to extract information about the small-$x$ behaviour of the gluon density of the proton. We also give a prediction for the transverse momentum and pseudorapidity distributions for bottom production at HERA.