Measurement of high-Q 2 e - p neutral current cross sections at HERA and the extraction of xF 3 : The ZEUS collaboration

Cross sections for e-p neutral current deep inelastic scatteringhave been measured at a centre-of-mass energy of 318 GeV using an integrated luminosity of 15.9 pb-1collected with the ZEUS detector at HERA. Results on the double-differential cross-section d2σ/dx dQ2in the range 185 200GeV2, are presented. To study the effect of Z-boson exchange, dσ/dx has also been measured for Q2> 10 000 GeV2. The structure function xF3has 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.