Measurement of beauty and charm cross sections in photoproduction using decays into electrons with ZEUS at HERA

Abstract

Photoproduction of heavy quarks in events with two jets and an electron associated with one of the jets has been studied with the ZEUS detector using the data recorded in the years 1996-2000 and 2006-2007, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of L = 120 pb^-1 and L = 190 pb^-1, respectively. The fractions of events containing b quarks, and also of events containing c quarks, were extracted from a likelihood fit using variables sensitive to electron identification as well as to semileptonic decays. For the second data-set the list of variables sensitive to the flavour could be extended using the additional information from the microvertexdetector. Total and differential cross sections for beauty and charm production were measured for both data-sets and compared with next-to-leading-order QCD calculations and Monte Carlo models.