Measurement of $D^{\ast \pm }$ production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

Abstract

The production of $D^{\ast \pm }$ mesons in deep inelastic $ep$ scattering has been measured for exchanged photon virtualities $ 5<Q^2<1000 \gev^2 $, using an integrated luminosity of 363 pb${}^{-1}$ with the ZEUS detector at HERA. Differential cross sections have been measured and compared to next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The cross-sections are used to extract the charm contribution to the proton structure functions, expressed in terms of the reduced charm cross section, ${\sigma }_{\mathrm{red}}^{c\bar{c}}$. Theoretical calculations based on fits to inclusive HERA data are compared to the results.

new version with errors fixed in tables 7,9,10 and figures 9,10