Deep inelastic beauty production at HERA in thek_T-factorization approach

Abstract

We calculate the cross section of beauty production in ep deep inelastic scattering at HERA collider in the framework of the k T -factorization approach. The unintegrated gluon distributions in a proton are obtained from the full CCFM, from unified BFKL-DGLAP evolution equations as well as from the Kimber-Martin-Ryskin prescription. We investigate different production rates and study the b-quark contribution to the inclusive proton structure function F 2 (x, Q 2 ) at small x and at moderate and high values of Q 2 . Our theoretical results are compared with the recent experimental data taken by the H1 and ZEUS collaborations. We demonstrate the importance of leading ln 1/x contributions in description of the HERA data.