Consistent treatment of charm evolution in deep inelastic scattering

We present a formulation which allows heavy quark mass effects to be explicitly incorporated in both the coefficient functions and the splitting functions in the parton evolution equations. We obtain a consistent procedure for evolution through the threshold regions for and production in deep inelastic scattering, which allows the prediction of the charm and bottom quark densities. We use the new formulation to perform a next-to-leading order global parton analysis of deep inelastic and related hard scattering data. We find that the optimum fit has . We give predictions for the charm components of the proton structure functions and as functions of and and, in particular, find that is in good agreement with the existing measurements. We examine the range of validity of the photon-gluon fusion model for electroproduction. We emphasize the value of a precision measurement of the charm component at HERA. Received: 12 May 1997 / Revised version: 12 June 1997