Detailed next-to-leading order analysis of deep inelastic neutrino induced charm production off strange sea partons

Neutrino induced deep inelastic charm production off strange sea partons in the nucleon is studied in the framework of the <(MS)over bar> fixed flavor factorization scheme. The momentum (z) distributions of the produced D mesons as calculated in the next-to-leading order QCD analysis are presented and compared to their leading order counterparts. Perturbative stability within this formalism is demonstrated and the compatibility of recent next-to-leading order (NLO) strange quark distributions with available dimuon data is investigated. Our NLO (<(MS)over bar>) results provide, for the first time, the tools required for a consistent and complete NLO (<(MS)over bar>) analysis of charged current dimuon data in order to extract the strange sea density in NLO. It is furthermore shown that the absolute predictions of radiatively (dynamically) generated strange sea densities are in agreement with all present measurements. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.