Next-to-Leading Order QCD Corrections to Charged Current Charm Production and the Unpolarized and Polarized Strange Sea at HERA

Charged current charm and D meson production is studied in detail as a means of determining the unpolarized and polarized strange sea densities at HERA. All analyses are performed in next-to-leading order QCD, including a calculation of the so far unknown spin-dependent MSbar coefficient functions up to O(alpha_s). It is shown that a decent measurement is possible in the unpolarized case, provided a sufficient luminosity can be reached in the future, while for longitudinally polarized beams it appears to be extremely challenging due to limitations imposed on the expected statistical accuracy by the charm detection efficiency.