Beauty production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA using decays into electrons

Abstract

The results from a recent analysis on beauty production in ep interactions at HERA studied with the ZEUS detector for exchanged four-momentum squared Q2 > 10 GeV2 are presented. The beauty events were identified using electrons from semileptonic b decays with a transverse momentum 0.9 < peT < 8GeV and pseudorapidity |ηe| < 1.5. The fraction of events containing b quarks was extracted from a likelihood fit using variables sensitive to electron identification as well as to semileptonic decays. Total and differential cross sections were measured and compared with next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The beauty contribution to the proton structure function F2 was extracted from the double-differential cross sections.