Heavy quark physics in ep collisions at LEP+LHC

We study electroweak production of heavy quarks - charm, beauty, and top - in deep inelastic electron-proton collisions at the proposed LEP+LHC collider at CERN. The assumed energy for the collisions is Ee=50 GeV, Ep=8000 GeV, providing an ep center of mass energy, √s≅1.26 TeV. We invoke the boson-gluon fusion model to estimate theoretical cross sections and distributions for the heavy quarks. Higher order QCD corrections are only approximately taken into account, by assuming a (normalization) K-factor of 2 for the charm and beauty quark production rates and incorporating the parton shower cascades. With these assumptions and the parameterization of Eichten et al. for the structure functions (EHLQ, set 1), we find the following cross sections: σ(ep→c+X)≅O(3 μb), σ(ep→b+X)≅O(40 nb), and σ(ep→t+X)≅4 pb for mt=120 GeV, decreasing to 0.5 pb for mt=250 GeV. These cross sections would provide O(6x109) charmed hadrons, O(8x107) beauty hadrons, and O(103) top hadrons, for an integrated ep luminosity of 1000 pb-1. The heavy quark rates in ep collisions are considerably smaller than the corresponding rates in pp collisions at LHC, with √s=16 TeV. This gives a clear advantage to pp collisions for top searches. However, for the charmed and beauty quarks only a tiny fraction of the cross sections in p+p→Q+X can be triggered in comparison to the corresponding cross sections in e+p→Q+X, resulting in comparable number of measured heavy quark events in the ep and pp mode. We sketch the energy-momentum profile of heavy quark events in ep collisions and illustrate the kind of analyses that experiments at the LEP+LHC collider would undertake to quantitatively study heavy quark physics. In particular, prospects of measuring the particle-antiparticle mixing parameter xs=ΔM/Γ for the Bs0-anti Bs0 meson system are evaluated, and search strategies for the top quark in ep collisions are presented. (orig.)