Heavy Quark Production Measurements at THERA.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 0 1 0 5 1 2 6 v 1 1 4 M a y 2 0 0 1 Heavy Quark Production Measurements at THERA ? 15th May 2001 L. Gladilin Weizmann Institute, Department of Particle Physics, Rehovot, Israel on leave from Moscow State University gladilin@mail.desy.de I. Redondo Universidad Auto?noma de Madrid, Departamento de F??sica Teo?rica, Madrid, Spain redondo@mail.desy.de Abstract The total cross sections of charm and beauty production at a future high–energy ep collider, THERA, are expected to increase by factors of three and five, respectively, as compared to HERA. Heavy quarks can be measured at THERA in wide ranges of trans- verse momenta and Q2 values, thereby providing a solid basis for testing the perturbative QCD calculations. The charm and beauty contributions to the proton structure can be probed at THERA at ～ 1 order of magnitude smaller Bjorken x values with respect to those at HERA. Charm production in the process of photon–gluon fusion at THERA can serve for the determination of the gluon structure of the proton in the as yet unexplored kinematic range 10?5 xg 10 ?4. The cross section of charm production in charged current at THERA is ～ 1 order of magnitude larger than that at HERA. ?To appear in “The THERA Book”, DESY-LC-REV-2001-062 (2001). 1 Introduction Heavy quarks are produced copiously at HERA which provides collisions between elec- trons or positrons with energy Ee = 27.5GeV and protons with energy Ep = 920GeV 1. The total charm and beauty cross sections at HERA are of the order of 1μb and 10 nb, respectively [1]. In photoproduction processes at HERA, a quasi-real photon with vir- tuality Q2 ～ 0 is emitted by the incoming electron and interacts with the proton. At leading order (LO) in QCD two types of processes are responsible for the production of heavy quarks: the direct photon processes, where the photon participates as a point-like particle, and the resolved photon processes, where the photon acts as a source of partons. The domina