Measurement of beauty production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA using decays into electrons

TL;DR

This paper reports on the measurement of beauty quark production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA, using electron decays to analyze cross sections and the beauty contribution to the proton structure function, comparing results with QCD predictions.

Contribution

First measurement of beauty production in DIS at HERA using electrons from semileptonic decays, providing data for QCD validation and proton structure insights.

Findings

Measured beauty production cross sections in ep collisions.

Extracted beauty contribution to proton structure function F_2.

Compared experimental results with next-to-leading-order QCD calculations.

Abstract

The production of beauty quarks in ep interactions has been studied with the ZEUS detector at HERA for exchanged four-momentum squared Q^2 > 10 GeV^2, using an integrated luminosity of 363 pb^{-1}. The beauty events were identified using electrons from semileptonic b decays with a transverse momentum 0.9 < p_T^e < 8 GeV and pseudorapidity |eta^e| < 1.5. Cross sections for beauty production were measured and compared with next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The beauty contribution to the proton structure function F_2 was extracted from the double-differential cross section as a function of Bjorken-x and Q^2.