D* Production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

Abstract This paper presents measurements of D ∗± production in deep inelastic scattering from collisions between 27.5 GeV positrons and 820 GeV protons. The data have been taken with the ZEUS detector at HERA. The decay channel D ∗+ → (D 0 → K − π + )π + (+c.c) has been used in the study. The e + p cross section for inclusive D ∗± production with 5 Q 2 2 > and y 1.3 T (D ∗± ) GeV and |η(D ∗± )| . Differential cross sections as functions of p T (D ∗± ) , η(D ∗± ) , W and Q 2 are compared with next-to-leading order QCD calculations based on the photon-gluon fusion production mechanism. After an extrapolation of the cross section to the full kinematic region in p T (D ∗± ) and η(D ∗± ) , the charm contribution F 2 cc (x, Q 2 ) to the proton structure function is determined for Bjorken x between 2 · 10 −4 and 5 · 10 −3 .