Measurement of beauty production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

The beauty production cross section for deep inelastic scattering events with\nat least one hard jet in the Breit frame together with a muon has been\nmeasured, for photon virtualities Q^2 > 2 GeV^2, with the ZEUS detector at HERA\nusing integrated luminosity of 72 pb^-1. The total visible cross section is\nsigma_b-bbar (ep -> e jet mu X) = 40.9 +- 5.7 (stat.) +6.0 -4.4 (syst.) pb. The\nnext-to-leading order QCD prediction lies about 2.5 standard deviations below\nthe data. The differential cross sections are in general consistent with the\nNLO QCD predictions; however at low values of Q^2, Bjorken x, and muon\ntransverse momentum, and high values of jet transverse energy and muon\npseudorapidity, the prediction is about two standard deviations below the data.\n Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures