Quark Masses and Specific Scaling in Deep-Inelastic Processes

摘要

Within an operator-product expansion, the problem of the quark-mass dependence of the heavy-flavor contribution to the structure function F_2 in the current-fragmentation region is considered at high values of the momentum transfer squared Q~2. A linear combination of the structure functions F_2~c and F_2 is found that possesses a specific scalling property for Q~2→∞ at small fixed values of the Bjorken variable x. A lower bound on the ratio F_2~c/F_2 is calculated and is compared with data obtained at the HERA collider.