Open Beauty Production at HERA

Abstract

Recent results on open beauty production in positron-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 300 GeV are presented. The beauty photoproduction cross section is measured by ZEUS and H1 via the semileptonic decay. Both experiments use the transverse lepton momentum with respect to a jet as an observable. The H1 central silicon vertex detector makes it possible to analyse, in addition, the lepton impact parameter spectrum, thus exploiting lifetime information for the first time at HERA. The combined lifetime and transverse momentum signature is further used to observe beauty production for the first time in deep inelastic scattering. All results are compared with NLO QCD calculations.

Proceedings, DIS 2001, Bologna, Italy. 4 pages, 4 figures