Do Quark Mass Effects Survive in the High-$Q^2$ Limit of DIS?

Abstract

Quark mass effects are analyzed at high $Q^2$ in the current fragmentation region of DIS. It is found that the linear combination $F_2-2.75F_2^c$ scales at large $Q^2$ and small $x$. We obtained a lower bound for the ratio $F_2^c/F_2$ which lies very close to the data from HERA.

Comments: 11 pages, 3 figures; content is corrected. To be published in Eur. Phys. Journal C