Results on open charm and beauty production and on the search for top production in high-energy electron-proton collisions at HERA are reviewed. This includes a discussion of relevant theoretical aspects, a summary of the available measurements and m
easurement techniques, and their impact on improved understanding of QCD and its parameters, such as parton density functions and charm- and beauty-quark masses. The impact of these results on measurements at the LHC and elsewhere is also addressed.
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 quar
ks 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.
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 o
f the ``default scale choice is advocated. Experimental constraints on the photon-quark coupling are also investigated.
