Beauty in photoproduction at HERA II with the ZEUS detector

Abstract

The production of beauty quarks in ep collisions should be accurately calculable in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) since the large mass of the b quark provides a hard scale. Therefore it is interesting to compare such predictions to results using photoproduction events where a low-virtuality photon, emitted by the incoming lepton, collides with a parton from the incoming proton. A measurement of beauty in photoproduction has been made at HERA with the ZEUS detector using an integrated luminosity of 126 pb−1. Beauty was identified in events with a muon in the final state by using the transverse momentum of the muon relative to the closest jet. Lifetime information from the silicon vertex detector was also used; the impact parameter of the muon with respect to the primary vertex was exploited to discriminate between signal and background. Cross sections for beauty production as a function of the muon and the jet variables were measured and compared to QCD predictions and to previous measurements. The data were found to be well described by the predictions from next-to-leading-order QCD. The dijet sample of beauty photoproduction events was also used to study higher-order QCD topologies. At leading order, the two jets in the event are produced back-to-back in azimuthal angle, such that \Delta\phi^j^j=\phi^j^1-\phi^j^2=\pi. Additional soft radiation causes small azimuthal decorrelations, whilst \Delta\phi^j^j significantly lower than \pi is evidence of additional hard radiation. In this thesis, the cross section versus \Delta\phi^j^j for beauty photoproduction and the comparison to NLO QCD predictions and Monte Carlo models are presented.