Charm Production and Fragmentation in Charged Current DIS

Abstract

In charged current deep inelastic scattering charm is dominantly produced in scattering events on strange quarks, thereby allowing for an experimental determination of the nucleon's strange sea density. A measurement of the energy spectrum of final state charm fragments (D-mesons) determines the charm fragmentation function at spacelike scales considerably below typical e^+e^- c.m.s. energies. NLO corrections to the naive s -> c parton model production picture are important and well understood.

Comments: 4 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, uses epsfig and espcrc2 style