Measurement of D ± and D 0 production in deep inelastic scattering using a lifetime tag at HERA

The production of D ±- and D 0-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 GeV2, 0.02<y<0.7, 1.5<p T <15 GeV and |η 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. Measurements are extrapolated to the full kinematic phase space in order to obtain the open-charm contribution, F₂cc̄ , to the proton structure function, F 2.