Role of gluons in the neutrino production of charm

Abstract

We suggest that a sensible and consistent way of treating the associated production of charm and strangeness in $\nu N$ or $\overline{\nu }N$ collisions is to consider the basic subprocess to be $W{}_{}{}^{+}{}_{}{}^{}V\to c\overline{s}$ or $W{}_{}{}^{-}{}_{}{}^{}V\to s\overline{c}$, respectively, where $W$ is the virtual weak gauge boson and $V$ denotes a colored gluon. An explicit calculation illustrates how the concept of the sea in the parton model can turn out to be process-dependent in the sense that relative amounts of charm and strangeness in the sea of a nucleon as inferred from neutrino data need not be the same as those inferred from electroproduction data.