Heavy-flavor parton distributions without heavy-flavor matching prescriptions

• Published in: The journal of high energy physics Vol. 2018; no. 4; pp. 1 - 32
• Main Authors: Bertone, Valerio, Glazov, Alexandre, Mitov, Alexander, Papanastasiou, Andrew S., Ubiali, Maria
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.04.2018; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Classical and Quantum Gravitation; Deep Inelastic Scattering (Phenomenology); Elementary Particles; Flavors; High energy physics; Matching; Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Protons; QCD Phenomenology; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Quantum Physics; Regular Article - Theoretical Physics; Relativity Theory; String Theory; Deep Inelastic Scattering (Phenomenology); QCD Phenomenology
• ISSN: 1029-8479; 1029-8479
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP04(2018)046

A bstract We show that the well-known obstacle for working with the zero-mass variable flavor number scheme, namely, the omission of O 1 mass power corrections close to the conventional heavy flavor matching point (HFMP) μ b = m , can be easily overcome. For this it is sufficient to take advantage of the freedom in choosing the position of the HFMP. We demonstrate that by choosing a sufficiently large HFMP, which could be as large as 10 times the mass of the heavy quark, one can achieve the following improvements: 1) above the HFMP the size of missing power corrections O m is restricted by the value of μ b and, therefore, the error associated with their omission can be made negligible; 2) additional prescriptions for the definition of cross-sections are not required; 3) the resummation accuracy is maintained and 4) contrary to the common lore we find that the discontinuity of α s and pdfs across thresholds leads to improved continuity in predictions for observables. We have considered a large set of proton-proton and electron-proton collider processes, many through NNLO QCD, that demonstrate the broad applicability of our proposal.