Measurement of D*± production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

The production of D ^*± mesons in deep inelastic ep scattering has been measured for exchanged photon virtualities 5 < Q ² < 1000 GeV², using an integrated luminosity of 363 pb⁻¹ with the ZEUS detector at HERA. Differential cross sections have been measured and compared to next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The cross-sections are used to extract the charm contribution to the proton structure functions, expressed in terms of the reduced charm cross section, $ \sigma_{\mathrm{red}}^{{c\overline{c}}} $ . Theoretical calculations based on fits to inclusive HERA data are compared to the results.