Measurement of charm and beauty production in deep inelastic ep scattering from decays into muons at HERA

TL;DR

This paper reports measurements of charm and beauty quark production in deep inelastic ep scattering at HERA, using muon decays to analyze differential cross sections and contributions to the proton structure function, confirming QCD predictions.

Contribution

It provides new measurements of charm and beauty production in ep scattering using muon decay channels, extending previous results and validating QCD models.

Findings

Results agree with previous measurements.

Data are well described by QCD predictions.

Charm and beauty contributions to F_2 are quantified.

Abstract

The production of charm and beauty quarks in ep interactions has been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA for squared four-momentum exchange Q^2>20 GeV^2, using an integrated luminosity of 126 pb^{-1}. Charm and beauty quarks were identified through their decays into muons. Differential cross sections were measured for muon transverse momenta p_T^{\mu}>1.5 GeV and pseudorapidities -1.6<\eta^{\mu}<2.3, as a function of p_T^{\mu}, \eta^{\mu}, Q^2 and Bjorken x. The charm and beauty contributions to the proton structure function F_2 were also extracted. The results agree with previous measurements based on independent techniques and are well described by QCD predictions.