Heavy quarks in charged-current deep inelastic scattering: a systematic phenomenological study

Abstract

We present a systematic QCD analysis of the strange--charm and bottom--top contributions to transverse and longitudinal structure functions in charged--current deep inelastic scattering. Various ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^1)$ schemes are studied and compared. The dependence of their predictions on the factorization scale $\mu^2$ is investigated. The theoretical uncertainties resulting from the choice of the scheme and of $\mu^2$ are estimated.