QCD formulation of charm production in deep-inelastic scattering and the sea-quark–gluon dichotomy

Abstract

Gluon-initiated contributions to deep-inelastic-scattering processes, such as charm production, can be comparable in magnitude to the ‘‘leading-order’’ sea-quark processes. A proper next-to-leading-order calculation in QCD confirms this and yields distinct dependences of these two contributions on the kinematic variables and on the charm-quark mass. These results imply that previous analyses of charm-production data to extract the strange and charm content of the nucleon, as well as the precise determination of standard-model parameters based on these analyses, need to be reassessed.