Title: Measurement of beauty production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA
Abstract: The beauty production cross section for deep inelastic scattering events with at least one hard jet in the Breit frame together with a muon has been measured, for photon virtualities Q2>2 GeV2, with the ZEUS detector at HERA using integrated luminosity of 72 pb−1. The total visible cross section is σbb¯(ep→e jet μX)=40.9±5.7(stat.)−4.4+6.0(syst.) pb. The next-to-leading order QCD prediction lies about 2.5 standard deviations below the data. The differential cross sections are in general consistent with the NLO QCD predictions; however at low values of Q2, Bjorken x, and muon transverse momentum, and high values of jet transverse energy and muon pseudorapidity, the prediction is about two standard deviations below the data.