Measurement of high-Q e-p neutral current cross sections at HERA and the extraction of xF3

Abstract

Cross sections for e-p neutral current deep inelastic scattering have been measured at a centre-of-mass energy of 318 GeV using an integrated luminosity of 15.9 pb-1 collected with the ZEUS detector at HERA. Results on the double-differential cross-section $d^2\sigma / dx dQ^2$ in the range 185 < Q 2 < 50 000 GeV2 and 0.0037 < x < 0.75, as well as the single-differential cross-sections $d\sigma / dQ^2$ , $d\sigma / dx$ and $d\sigma / dy$ for Q 2 > 200 GeV2, are presented. To study the effect of Z-boson exchange, $d\sigma / dx$ has also been measured for Q 2 > 10 000 GeV2. The structure function xF3 has been extracted by combining the e-p results presented here with the recent ZEUS measurements of e+p neutral current deep inelastic scattering. All results agree well with the predictions of the Standard Model.