https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-015-3618-z
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Impact of heavy-flavour production cross sections measured by the LHCb experiment on parton distribution functions at low x
PROSA Collaboration
1
DESY Hamburg and Zeuthen, Hamburg, Germany
2
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
3
Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
4
School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
5
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA
6
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie, Karlsruhe, Germany
7
LPSC Grenoble, Grenoble, France
* e-mail: oleksandr.zenaiev@desy.de
Received:
27
March
2015
Accepted:
12
August
2015
Published online:
27
August
2015
The impact of recent measurements of heavy-flavour production in deep inelastic ep scattering and in pp collisions on parton distribution functions is studied in a QCD analysis in the fixed-flavour number scheme at next-to-leading order. Differential cross sections of charm- and beauty-hadron production measured by LHCb are used together with inclusive and heavy-flavour production cross sections in deep inelastic scattering at HERA. The heavy-flavour data of the LHCb experiment impose additional constraints on the gluon and the sea-quark distributions at low partonic fractions x of the proton momentum, down to 
. This kinematic range is currently not covered by other experimental data in perturbative QCD fits.
© The Author(s), 2015
