Measurement of D+- and D0 production in deep inelastic scattering using a lifetime tag at HERA

Understand

The production of D+- and D0 mesons has been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 133.6 pb-1.

• The measurements cover the kinematic range 5 < Q^2 < 1000 GeV^2, 0.02 < y < 0.7, 1.5 < p_T^D < 15 GeV and eta^D < 1.6.
• Combinatorial background to the D meson signals is reduced by using the ZEUS microvertex detector to reconstruct displaced secondary vertices.
• Production cross sections are compared with the predictions of next-to-leading-order QCD which is found to describe the data well.