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 trans- verse 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)_{−0.07}^{+0.01}(mod.)_{−0.00}^{+0.05}(param.)_{−0.05}^{+0.08}(theo.)GeV.