Heavy flavor production at HERA

Abstract

Recent results of open charm and beauty production in electron proton scattering at HERA are presented. In photoproduction, the measured cross sections for charm exceed fixed order NLO QCD calculations. Experimental evidence supports the hypothesis that a significant fraction of photoproduction events with charm can be described by resolved photon processes, where the charm quark is a constituent of the resolved photon. In deep inelastic scattering the NLO calculations give in general a fairly reasonable description of the observed charm cross sections. The measurements of the structure function $F_2^{cc}$ show that, at large photon virtualities and low x, the events with charm constitute a major part of the total ep cross section. The beauty cross sections both in photoproduction and in DIS exceed NLO predictions.

Comments: 6 pages, 9 figures in eps, talk given at XXXI International Symposium on Multiparticle Dynamics, Sept 1-7, 2001, Datong China. URL http://ismd31.ccnu.edu.cn/