# Heavy Flavour Physics at HERA

## Introduction

At HERA positrons of 27.5 GeV collide with 820 GeV protons yielding a center of mass energy of 300 GeV. Heavy flavours are predominantly produced in pairs by photon gluon fusion. Charm quark production is expected to be a factor 200 more abundant than bottom quarks at this energy. Heavy flavour processes give new opportunities of studying perturbative QCD at center of mass energies roughly a factor 10 higher than in fixed target experiments.

There are several methods to tag heavy flavours: “Open” charm production is tagged via reconstruction of $`D^{}`$ (H1 and ZEUS) or via semi–leptonic decays to electrons (ZEUS). b quarks have been measured via semi–muonic decays by H1. Finally “hidden” charm is studied via reconstruction of $`J/\psi `$ (see fig. 1). $`\psi (2s)`$ and $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ Mesons have as yet been reconstructed only in diffractive processes \[1a\] at HERA and will not be reported here.

The integrated luminosity delivered by HERA has steadily increased over the years. This review will cover data from 1995 ($`6\text{pb}^1`$), 1996 ($`10\text{pb}^1`$) and 1997 ($`26\text{pb}^1`$). Most results are preliminary.

The usual kinematic variables for deep inelastic scattering are used:

$`s=(k+P)^2;Q^2=(kk^{})^2;x=\frac{Q^2}{2Pq};y=\frac{qP}{kP};W_{\gamma p}^2=(q+P)^2=syQ^2`$

where $`k`$ and $`P`$ are the four vectors of incoming electron and proton, and $`q`$ of the exchanged photon.

## Determination of $`𝑭_\mathrm{𝟐}^𝒄`$

The inclusive cross section for production of charm in deep inelastic scattering (DIS) can be written as

$$\frac{d^2\sigma ^{epec\overline{c}X}}{dxdQ^2}=\frac{2\pi \alpha ^2}{xQ^4}(1+(1y)^2)F_2^c(x,Q^2)$$

where the contribution due to $`F_L`$ has been neglected since it is expected to be small.

Charm is tagged through reconstruction of $`D^+D^0\pi ^+`$ with subsequent decay $`D^0K^{}\pi ^+`$ and also the charge conjugate decay. ZEUS has presented a new analysis of semileptonic charm decays $`ce^++X`$. The electron was identified using the electromagnetic calorimeter and the specific energy loss $`dE/dx`$ in the driftchamber. Details of the analysis from H1 and ZEUS can be found in \[1b\].

For $`D^{}`$ production a comparison to the RAPGAP Monte Carlo rapgap  simulation is shown in fig. 3. Reasonable agreement is found. After unfolding detector effects cross sections are obtained in a restricted kinematical region, examples from H1 data are shown in fig. 3. The data are compared to a NLO calculation by Harris and Smith harris  using the Peterson fragmentation function. The agreement is good and the extrapolation to the full kinematic region is done with this calculation.

The resulting $`Q^2`$ and $`x`$ dependence of $`F_2^c`$ is shown in fig. 4. The data span $`Q^2`$ values from 1.8 to 130 GeV<sup>2</sup> and $`510^5x0.02`$. The agreement of the different data sets is reasonable within errors. Also shown is the theoretical NLO calculation using the GRV94-HO parton density functions which reproduces the data well. A strong rise of $`F_2^c`$ towards low $`x`$ is observed at fixed $`Q^2`$ and in $`Q^2`$ strong scaling violations are seen at fixed $`x`$. $`F_2^c`$ gives a contribution of between 10% (low $`Q^2`$) and 30% (high $`Q^2`$) to the inclusive $`F_2`$ at an $`x510^4`$.

## Photoproduction of $`𝑫^{\mathbf{}}`$

When the exchanged photon is almost real, contributions due to its hadronic nature have to be taken into account (“resolved” processes). In NLO QCD calculations an unambiguous separation of the direct process (fig. 7a) and resolved processes (b and c) is no longer possible, only the sum of the two is well defined. There are two approaches to calculate the photoproduction cross sections in next to leading order:

The “massive” approach frixione  where only the light quarks u, d and s and gluons are active partons in the photon (and proton). Charm is only generated in the hard subprocess (see also fig. 7b). This approach is valid for $`m_c\mathrm{\Lambda }_{QCD}`$. The “massless” approach kniehl ; cacciari  where also charm is an active flavour. This approach is valid at $`p_tm_c`$.

The high statistics data from ZEUS dstarz-vanc  are shown in fig. 7. They are found to be above the massive and massless calulations. The comparison of H1 data \[1b\] with massive calculations shown in fig. 7 is satisfactory.

ZEUS has presented an analysis of $`D^{}`$ events which contain two jets dstarz-vanc . In these events the observed momentum fraction $`x_\gamma ^{obs}`$ can be calculated, which describes the fraction of the photon energy contributing to the production of the two jets. A significant tail at low $`x_\gamma ^{obs}`$ is found in the data. In the generator HERWIG this tail can be described by charm excitation in the photon, while considering only light flavours leads to discrepancies.

## Gluon density from $`𝑫^{\mathbf{}}`$ events

H1 extracted the proton’s gluon density function in DIS ($`2<Q^2<100\text{GeV}^2,\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0.05}<y<0.7`$) and in photoproduction ($`0.02<y<0.32;\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0.29}<y<0.62;Q^20`$) \[1b\].

The observed momentum fraction $`x_g^{obs}`$ of the gluon is reconstructed from the kinematics of the final state and a differential cross section $`d\sigma /dx_g^{obs}`$ is determined, which for the DIS data is shown in fig. 8. The correlation of $`x_g^{obs}`$ with the true $`x_g`$ as given by the NLO QCD calculations harris  – also shown in fig. 8 – is used in an iterative unfolding procedure to obtain $`d\sigma /dx_g`$. The gluon density is then obtained by reweighting the calculation with the measured cross section. The result is shown in fig. 8 as a momentum distribution $`x_gg(x_g)`$. The range $`10^3<x_g<0.02`$ is covered. The data from photoproduction and DIS agree well within the large errors. They also agree with the result from an analysis of scaling violations in the inclusive measurement of $`F_2`$ h1newglue .

## $`𝒃\overline{𝒃}`$ Production

Due to the higher mass of the $`b`$ quark the total cross section for $`b\overline{b}`$ production is expected to be 200 times smaller than that for $`c\overline{c}`$ production. The theoretical uncertainties in calculating the next to leading order predictions are, however, smaller btheor . H1 determined the cross section for the first time in the HERA energy range using semi–muonic $`b`$ decays \[1c\].

A photoproduction event sample was selected containing two jets of transverse energy $`E_T>`$ 6 GeV and a muon of transverse momentum (relative to the beam direction) $`p_T^\mu >`$ 2 GeV in the central detector region $`35^{}<\theta ^\mu <130^{}`$.

The thrust axis<sup>2</sup><sup>2</sup>2The thrust axis is the axis which maximizes $`T=\text{max}(\frac{\mathrm{\Sigma }p_i^L}{\mathrm{\Sigma }|p_i|})`$, where the sum runs over all particles belonging to the jet and $`p_i^L`$ is the component of the particle momentum parallel to the thrust axis. was determined for each jet in order to approximate the $`b`$ flight direction. The transverse momentum of the muon $`p_{t,rel}^\mu `$ with respect to the jet is used as a discriminating variable: Muons from $`b`$ decay show a $`p_{t,rel}^\mu `$ spectrum extending to higher values than $`c`$ decays (see fig. 9 for an illustration of the method).

The background comes from the production of the light quarks $`u,d`$ and $`s`$, which is roughly a factor 2000 larger than $`b`$ production. Punch through and decay in flight lead to false muon signatures. The contribution is determined from data using an independent dataset and using the muon fake probability and the hadron composition from a well tuned and checked simulation program. The resulting $`p_{t,rel}^\mu `$ spectrum is shown in fig. 9 indicating the background contribution (23.5%), which is absolutely determined. The fractions of $`b`$ and $`c`$ quarks are obtained from a fit to the data distribution, yielding (51.4 $`\pm `$ 4.4)% and $`(23.5\pm 4.3)`$%, respectively.

The cross section in the visible kinematic range of $`Q^2<1\text{GeV}^2;p_T^\mu >2\text{GeV}`$; $`95W_{\gamma p}270\text{GeV};\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}35}^{}<\theta ^\mu <130^{}`$ is determined as

$$\sigma (epeb\overline{b}+X)^{vis}=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0.93}\pm 0.08_{0.12}^{+0.21}\text{nb},$$

where the first error is statistical and the second systematic. Contributions to the systematic errors are the branching ratio $`bX\mu \nu `$, the energy scale of calorimeters and detector efficiencies.

The corresponding direct LO cross section from the AROMA AROMA  simulation is $`0.19\text{nb}`$, roughly a factor 5 lower. The fraction of $`c`$ quarks determined from this analysis leads to the same cross section for $`epec\overline{c}X`$ as previously determined from analysis of $`D^{}`$ production ccbar .

## Inelastic $`𝑱\mathbf{/}𝝍`$ production

New data on charmonium ($`J/\psi ,\psi ^{}`$) and $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ production have been presented by H1 and ZEUS \[1a\]. Here we will concentrate on “inelastic” $`J/\psi `$ production as opposed to the diffractive processes which dominate the cross section at low $`Q^2`$. Inelastic $`J/\psi `$ production could at lower $`W_{\gamma p}`$ (fixed target regime) be well described by the Colour Singlet Model (CSM). For HERA the CSM cross section calculations are available in NLO Kraemer .

As is well known the CSM fails to describe charmonium production in $`p\overline{p}`$ collisions at high $`p_T`$ fail . Colour octet contributions have been proposed for an adequate description. The NRQCD factorisation approach (NRQCD = Non Relativistic QCD) describes any process $`A+BJ/\psi +X`$ as a sum over colour singlet and colour octet contributions.

Whereas the transformation of a colour singlet $`{}_{}{}^{3}S_{1}^{}`$ state into a $`J/\psi `$ can be calculated using the measured semileptonic decay width, the transition of a colour octet state to $`J/\psi `$ is non–perturbative and at present not calculable. Therefore predictions for the cross section at HERA use the non perturbative transition matrix elements extracted from the CDF data.

The ZEUS collaboration has updated their photoproduction data \[1d\]. The results for the $`\gamma p`$ cross section as function of $`W_{\gamma p}`$ and of $`z`$ are shown in fig. 10. The data agree well with the next to leading order pQCD calculation in the color singlet model Kraemer . The variable $`z`$ is defined as $`z=\frac{P_\psi P}{Pq}\frac{E_\psi }{E_\gamma }`$ where the latter approximation holds in the proton rest frame. In fig. 10 b in addition to the CSM in NLO calulations using the NRQCD/factorisation approach com ; Cano ; Martin  are shown. The upper curve was calculated in LO using the transition matrix elements extracted from CDF data in LO and shows a strong rise towards high $`z`$ values. The lower curves also take into account higher orders approximately as explained in refs. com ; Cano ; Martin . Doing so leads to modifications in the non perturbative matrix elements and/or in the cross sections themselves. The net effect is a decrease of the predicted rise at high $`z`$.

H1 has for the first time determined the cross sections for inelastic $`J/\psi `$ production at $`Q^2>2\text{GeV}^2`$ \[1d\]. The results are shown in fig. 11. Two data sets are shown, a completely inclusive one (open points) and one where the diffractive contributions have been removed by a cut on the energy in the forward region of the detector as suggested by Fleming and Mehen fleming , whose LO calculations are shown for comparison. The data are seen to be far above the CS contributions. The magnitude of the data is reproduced better taking into account colour octet contributions. The shape of the latter leaves, however, much room for improvement, in particular in the rapidity $`y^{}`$ in the $`\gamma ^{}p`$ center of mass system. Note that the NRQCD calculations are performed at the parton level, no smearing due to the transition into $`J/\psi `$ is taken into account.

## Summary

Due to increased statistics detailed analyses of heavy flavour production in $`ep`$ collisions are performed in a variety of channels and kinematic regions. $`b\overline{b}`$ production was observed for the first time in photoproduction via semi–muonic decay of the b–quark. The cross section was found to be considerably larger than the leading order predictions for the direct process.   
In the range $`2<`$$`Q^2`$$`<\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}130}`$$`\text{GeV}^2`$cross sections and the charm contribution to $`F_2^c`$ are determined and found to agree with next to leading order predictions. In photoproduction the validity of different approaches to calculate next to leading order corrections is being studied in various kinematic regions.

Since photon gluon fusion is the dominant process a direct determination of the gluon density in the proton was carried out in DIS and in the photoproduction regime. The result agrees with the indirect determinations from scaling violations.

Inelastic $`J/\psi `$ production is studied in photoproduction and DIS and is well described in photoproduction by the color singlet model alone in next to leading order. In DIS the data have been compared to LO color singlet and color octet predictions (at parton level). In the latter rough agreement in absolute normalisation is found, while the color singlet model reproduces the shape of the data slightly better.

### Acknowledgement

I wish to thank the organisers for a very pleasant and fruitful meeting and my colleagues at ZEUS and H1 for supplying their data and for discussions.