Charm contribution to the proton structure function in deep-inelastic ep scattering at the HERA collider

Abstract
The structure function F 2 c is evaluated within the charm-production model based on perturbative QCD. The results are compared with H1 and ZEUS data obtained at the HERA collider. It is shown that, for D*-meson production, the spectator mechanism, which is independent of the flavors of the hadronic-remnant quarks, comes into play for p T >10 GeV and that, in calculating charm production in the kinematical domain studied at the HERA collider, it is not necessary to take into account the evolution of the c-quark distribution in the initial-state hadron.