Quark masses and specific scaling in deep-inelastic processes

Within an operator-product expansion, the problem of the quark-mass dependence of the heavy-flavor contribution to the structure function F2 in the current-fragmentation region is considered at high values of the momentum transfer squared Q2. A linear combination of the structure functions F2c and F2 is found that possesses a specific scaling property for Q2 → ∞ at small fixed values of the Bjorken variable x. A lower bound on the ratio F2c/F2 is calculated and is compared with data obtained at the HERA collider.