Measurement of beauty and charm production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA and measurement of the beauty-quark mass

Abstract

The production of beauty and charm quarks in ep interactions has been studied with the ZEUS detector at HERA for exchanged four-momentum squared 5 < Q 2 < 1000 GeV 2 using an integrated luminosity of 354 pb -1 . The beauty and charm content in events with at least one jet have been extracted using the invariant mass of charged tracks associated with secondary vertices and the decay-length significance of these vertices. Differential cross sections as a function of Q 2 , Bjorken x, jet transverse energy and pseudorapidity were measured and compared with next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The beauty and charm contributions to the proton structure functions were extracted from the double-differential cross section as a function of x and Q 2 . The running beauty-quark mass, m b at the scale m b , was determined from a QCD fit at next-to-leading order to HERA data for the first time and found to be m b (m b ) = 4.07 0.14 (fit) +0.01 -0.07 (mod.) +0.05 -0.00 (param.) +0.08 -0.05 (theo.) GeV.