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.U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC02-06CH11357]; Office of Nuclear Physics of the U.S. DOE [DE-SC0011090]; National Nature Science Foundation of China [11375013, 11135003]SCI(E)EIPubMedARTICLEberger@anl.gov; jgao@anl.gov; csli@pku.edu.cn; liuzelong@pku.edu.cn; zhuhx@mit.edu2121200211