Charm-Quark Production in Deep-Inelastic Neutrino Scattering at Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order in QCD

We present a fully differential next-to-next-to-leading order calculation of charm-quark production in charged-current deep-inelastic scattering, with full charm-quark mass dependence. The next-to-next-to-leading order corrections in perturbative quantum chromodynamics are found to be comparable in size to the next-to-leading order corrections in certain kinematic regions. We compare our predictions with data on dimuon production in (anti)neutrino scattering from a heavy nucleus. Our results can be used to improve the extraction of the parton distribution function of a strange quark in the nucleon.

Figure 1

Dependence of various components of the $O({\alpha }_s^2)$ reduced cross sections on the cutoff parameter for charm-quark production in neutrino DIS from iron. (Upper panel) Double-virtual (VV), real-virtual (RV), and double-real (RR) contributions to the full $O({\alpha }_s^2)$ corrections. (Lower panel) The full correction (solid line) and the contribution from the gluon channel shifted by a constant.

Figure 2

Scale variations at LO, NLO, and NNLO of the differential distribution in $x$ for charm-quark production in neutrino DIS from iron, normalized to the LO distribution with the nominal scale choice. The solid line shows the corresponding central prediction with the nominal scale choice.

Figure 3

Comparison of theoretical predictions to the doubly differential cross sections measured by NuTeV for charm-quark production through neutrino DIS from iron.

Figure 4

Comparison of theoretical predictions for ratios of the dimuon cross section to the inclusive charged-current cross section measured by NOMAD for neutrino DIS from iron.