D production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

This paper presents measurements of D{sup *{+-}} production in deep inelastic scattering from collisions between 27.5 GeV positrons and 820 GeV protons. The data have been taken with the ZEUS detector at HERA. The decay channel D{sup *+} {yields} (D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -}{pi}{sup +}){pi}{sup +} (+c.c) has been used in the study. The e{sup +}p cross section for inclusive D{sup *{+-}} production with 5 and y < 0.7 is 5.3 {+-} 1.0 {+-} 0.8 nb in the kinematic region 1.3 < p{sub T}(D{sup *{+-}}) < 9.0 GeV and |{eta}(D{sup *{+-}})| < 1.5. Differential cross sections as functions of p{sub T}(D{sup *{+-}}), {eta}(D{sup *{+-}}), W and Q{sup 2} are compared with next-to-leading order QCD calculations based on the photon-gluon fusion production mechanism. After an extrapolation of the cross section to the full kinematic region in p{sub T}(D{sup *{+-}}) and {eta}(D{sup *{+-}}), the charm contribution F{sub 2}{sup c}{bar c}(x, Q{sup 2}) to the proton structure function is determined for Bjorken x between 2 x 10{sup -4} and 5 x 10{sup -3}.