Calculating heavy quark distributions

A systematic calculation of the evolution of parton distribution functions including the effects of heavy-quark masses is presented. The method involves the use of a special renormalization scheme which ensures ordinary massless evolution with the correct number of active quark flavors at all stages, and specifies appropriate matching conditions at thresholds. This method is applicable to all orders of the perturbation expansion in principle, and it is simple to implement in practice. Results of this calculation using known distributions at low energies as input are examined and compared with published results. The heavy-quark distribution functions are found to be about a factor of two larger than the well-known EHLQ results.