No Arabic abstract
We review measurements of open beauty production at HERA, with emphasis on recent results based on lifetime signatures. The beauty cross sections in photoproduction and deep-inelastic scattering are found to be higher than expected in QCD at next-to-leading order. The discussion includes new results on beauty production in e+e-, gamma-gamma and p-bar-p interactions. An outlook on the potential for measurements with the upgraded HERA collider and experiments is also given.
Selected new results from the H1 and ZEUS collaborations on $ep$ interactions at 300 - 318 GeV centre-of-mass energy are presented. The full pre-upgrade integrated luminosity of HERA of 110 pb$^{-1}$ is used. Charm cross sections are measured up to high values of $x_B$ and $Q^2$ and are found to be well described by NLO QCD in the 3 flavour scheme. Orbitally excited $D$ mesons are observed; radial excitations are searched for, but are not seen. The first $b$ cross section measurement is confirmed with a lifetime based method, establishing the excess over NLO QCD.
Experimental results on beauty production at HERA are reviewed in the context of similar measurements at other colliders. As a result of a phenomenological study of the QCD scale dependence of many different NLO and NNLO predictions, a modification of the ``default scale choice is advocated. Experimental constraints on the photon-quark coupling are also investigated.
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 4.07 pm 0.14 (fit} ^{+0.01}_{-0.07} (mod.) ^{+0.05}_{-0.00} (param.) ^{+0.08}_{-0.05} (theo) GeV.
The associated production of a $W$ boson with a jet originating from either a light parton or heavy-flavor quark is studied in the forward region using proton-proton collisions. The analysis uses data corresponding to integrated luminosities of 1.0 and $2.0,{rm fb}^{-1}$ collected with the LHCb detector at center-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV, respectively. The $W$ bosons are reconstructed using the $Wtomu u$ decay and muons with a transverse momentum, $p_{rm T}$, larger than 20 GeV in the pseudorapidity range $2.0<eta<4.5$. The partons are reconstructed as jets with $p_{rm T} > 20$ GeV and $2.2 < eta < 4.2$. The sum of the muon and jet momenta must satisfy $p_{rm T} > 20$ GeV. The fraction of $W+$jet events that originate from beauty and charm quarks is measured, along with the charge asymmetries of the $W!+!b$ and $W!+!c$ production cross-sections. The ratio of the $W+$jet to $Z+$jet production cross-sections is also measured using the $Ztomumu$ decay. All results are in agreement with Standard Model predictions.
Beauty production in deep inelastic scattering with events in which a muon and a jet are observed in the final state has been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 114 pb^-1. The fraction of events with beauty quarks in the data was determined using the distribution of the transverse momentum of the muon relative to the jet. The cross section for beauty production was measured in the kinematic range of photon virtuality, Q^2 > 2 Gev^2, and inelasticity, 0.05 < y < 0.7, with the requirement of a muon and a jet. Total and differential cross sections are presented and compared to QCD predictions. The beauty contribution to the structure function F_2 was extracted and is compared to theoretical predictions.