Measurement of beauty production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

The beauty production cross section for deep inelastic scatteringevents with at least one hard jet in the Breit frame together with a muonhas been measured, for photon virtualities Q2>2 GeV2, with the ZEUS detector at HERAusing integrated luminosity of 72 pb-1. The total visible cross section is σbb(ep→e jet μX)=40.9±5.7(stat.)-4.4+6. 0(syst.) pb. The next-to-leading order QCD prediction lies about 2.5 standard deviationsbelow the data. The differential cross sections are in general consistent with the NLO QCD predictions; however at low values of Q2, Bjorken x, and muontransverse momentum, and high values of jet transverse energy and muon pseudorapidity, the prediction is about two standard deviationsbelow the data. © 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.