The FONLL general-mass variable-flavour number scheme provides a framework for the matching of a calculation in which a heavy quark is treated as a massless parton to one in which the mass dependence is retained throughout. We describe how the usual formulation of FONLL can be extended in such a way that the heavy quark parton distribution functions are freely parameterized at some initial scale, rather than being generated entirely perturbatively. We specifically consider the case of deep-inelastic scattering, in view of applications to PDF determination, and the possible impact of a fitted charm quark distribution on F2c is assessed.
@article{arxiv.1510.00009,
title = {Intrinsic charm in a matched general-mass scheme},
author = {Richard D. Ball and Valerio Bertone and Marco Bonvini and Stefano Forte and Patrick Groth Merrild and Juan Rojo and Luca Rottoli},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.00009},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
16 pages, 5 figures. Final version, to be published in Physics Letters B. Typo in eq 13 corrected, minor clarifications added