The Hadronic Final State at HERA

TL;DR

This review summarizes extensive research on the hadronic final state at HERA, highlighting tests of QCD, proton structure insights, and searches for exotic phenomena, demonstrating HERA's pivotal role in understanding strong interactions.

Contribution

It compiles and synthesizes over 200 publications, providing a comprehensive overview of experimental tests and theoretical developments in QCD at HERA.

Findings

Rigorous tests of perturbative QCD at high energy scales

Constraints on proton structure from precise measurements

Evidence supporting perturbative descriptions of diffraction

Abstract

The hadronic final state in electron-proton collisions at HERA has provided a rich testing ground for development of the theory of the strong force, QCD. In this review, over 200 publications from the H1 and ZEUS Collaborations are summarised. Short distance physics, the measurement of processes at high energy scales, has provided rigorous tests of perturbative QCD and constrained the structure of the proton as well as allowing precise measurements of the strong coupling constant to be made. Non-perturbative or low energy processes have also been investigated and results on hadronisation interpreted together with those from other experiments. Searches for exotic QCD objects, such as pentaquarks, glueballs and instantons have been performed. The subject of diffraction has been re-invigorated through its precise measurement, such that it can now be described by perturbative QCD. After discussion of HERA, the H1 and ZEUS detectors and the techniques used to reconstruct differing hadronic final states, the above subject areas are elaborated. The major achievements are then condensed further in a final section summarising what has been learned.