Measurement of D Mesons Production in Deep Inelastic Scattering at HERA

Charm production in deep inelastic scattering has been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 82 pb-1. Charm has been tagged by reconstructing D*+, D0, D+ and D+s (+ c.c.) charm mesons. The charm hadrons were measured in the kinematic range pT (D* +,D 0,D+) > 3GeV, pT (D+s ) > 2GeV and |η(D)| < 1.6 for 1.5 < Q2 < 1000GeV2 and 0.02 < y < 0.7. The production cross sections were used to extract charm fragmentation ratios and the fraction of c quarks hadronising into a particular charm meson in the kinematic range considered. The cross sections were compared to the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD, and extrapolated to the full kinematic region in pT (D) and η(D) in order to determine the open-charm contribution, Fcc2 (x,Q2), to the proton structure function F2.