2002/06/10 by The OPAL collaboration, C. Ainsley, G. Abbiendi +98 · 15 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Charged particle #Charm (quantum number) #Charm quark #Cross section (physics) #Electron #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Ion #Meson #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Perturbative QCD #Photon #Physics #Production (economics) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum chromodynamics #Quark #hep-ex
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/s0370-2693(02)01999-8
published in Physics Letters B 539(1-2), 13-24 (Elsevier BV) · 18 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2002/06/10 · openalex publication_date 2002/07/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The production of charm quarks is studied in deep-inelastic electron-photon scattering using data recorded by the OPAL detector at LEP at normal e+e- centre-of-mass energies from 183 to 209 GeV. The charm quarks have been identified by full reconstruction of charged D* mesons using their decays into D0pi with the D0 observed in two decay modes with charged particle final states, Kpi and K3pi. The cross-section sigma(D*) for production of charged D* in the reaction e+e- -> e+e-D*X is measured in a restricted kinematical region using two bins in Bjorken x, 0.0014 < x < 0.1 and 0.1 < x < 0.87. From sigma(D*) the charm production cross-section sigma(e+e- -> e+e- ccbar X) and the charm structure function of the photon F 2,c are determined in the region 0.0014 < x < 0.87 and 5 < Q2 < 100 GeV2. For x > 0.1 the perturbative QCD calculation at next-to-leading order agrees perfectly with the measured cross-section. For x < 0.1 the measured cross-section is 43.8 +- 14.3 +- 6.3 +- 2.8 pb with a next-to-leading order prediction of 17.0+2.9-2.3 p.b