The study of D and D meson production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA II with the ZEUS detector

Abstract

Installed in 2000/2001, the ZEUS micro vertex detector provided the capability to reconstruct secondary vertices displaced from the primary by distances of the order 100 pm. In order to be useful for tagging heavy flavour mesons the micro vertex detector was aligned with a combination of tracks from cosmic events and ep events in the HERA collider. This thesis presents measurements of and D meson production obtained with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 133.6 pb-1. The measurements cover the kinematic range 5 < Q2 < 1000 GeV2, 0.02 < y < 0.7, 1.5 < p{dollar} < 15 GeV and 11 < 1.6. Combinatorial background to the D meson signals is reduced by using the ZEUS micro vertex detector to reconstruct displaced secondary vertices. Production cross sections are compared with the predictions of next-to-leading order QCD which is found to describe the data well. Measurements are extrapolated to the full kinematic phase space in order to obtain the open charm contribution, F2ca, to the proton structure function, F2.