Measurement of beauty production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA using decays into electrons

The production of beauty quarks in ep interactions has been studied with the ZEUS detector at HERA for exchanged four-momentum squared Q 2 > 10 GeV 2 , using an integrated luminosity of 363 pb -1 . The beauty events were identified using electrons from semileptonic b decays with a transverse momentum 0.9 < p e T < 8 GeV and pseudorapidity | e | < 1.5. Cross sections for beauty production were measured and compared with next-to-leadingorder QCD calculations. The beauty contribution to the proton structure function F 2 was extracted from the doubledifferential cross section as a function of Bjorken-x and Q 2 .