Abstract

Inclusive production of D ∗ mesons in deep-inelastic ep scattering at HERA is studied in the range 5<Q 2<100 GeV2 of the photon virtuality and 0.02<y<0.7 of the inelasticity of the scattering process. The observed phase space for the D ∗ meson is p T (D ∗)>1.25 GeV and |η(D ∗)|<1.8. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 348 pb−1 collected with the H1 detector. Single and double differential cross sections are measured and the charm contribution F2cc to the proton structure function F 2 is determined. The results are compared to perturbative QCD predictions at next-to-leading order implementing different schemes for the charm mass treatment and with Monte Carlo models based on leading order matrix elements with parton showers.