Beauty production in deep inelastic scattering with events in which a muon and a jet are observed in the final state has been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA using an integrated luminosity of 114 pb −1 . The fraction of events with beauty quarks in the data was determined using the distribution of the transverse momentum of the muon relative to the jet. The cross section for beauty production was measured in the kinematic range of photon virtuality, Q 2 > 2 GeV 2 , and inelasticity, 0.05 < y < 0.7, with the requirement of a muon and a jet. Total and differential cross sections are presented and compared to QCD predictions. The beauty contribution to the structure function F 2 was extracted and is compared to theoretical predictions.

We apply a subtracted dispersion relation formalism with the aim to improve predictions for the two-photon exchange corrections to elastic electron-proton scattering observables at finite momentum transfers. We study the formalism on the elastic contribution, and make a detailed comparison with existing data for unpolarized cross sections as well as polarization transfer observables.

We evaluate the two-photon exchange (TPE) correction to the muon-proton elastic scattering at small momentum transfer. Besides the elastic (nucleon) intermediate state contribution, which is calculated exactly, we account for the inelastic intermediate states by expressing the TPE process approximately through the forward doubly virtual Compton scattering. The input in our evaluation is given by the unpolarized proton structure functions and by one subtraction function. For the latter, we provide an explicit evaluation based on a Regge fit of high-energy proton structure function data. It is found that, for the kinematics of the forthcoming muon-proton elastic scattering data of the MUSE experiment, the elastic TPE contribution dominates, and the size of the inelastic TPE contributions is within the anticipated error of the forthcoming data.

We extend the general formalism of two-photon exchange to elastic lepton-nucleon scattering by accounting for all lepton mass terms. We then perform a numerical estimate of the muon-proton scattering at low momentum transfer in view of the future MUSE experiment. For this purpose, we estimate the two-photon exchange corrections to muon-proton scattering observables by considering the contribution of the proton intermediate state, which is expected to dominate at very low momentum transfers. We find that the two-photon exchange effect to the unpolarized muon- proton scattering cross section in the MUSE kinematical region is of the order of 0.5%.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, version published in Phys. Rev. D 90, 013006 (2014