Energy flow and transverse momentum properties of hadrons produced by deep inelastic μ-p scattering

Results are presented from an experiment performed at CERN by the European Muon Collaboration in which a liquid hydrogen target was exposed to a 280 Gev beam of muons obtained from the CERN SPS accelerator. The analysis is based on measurements of the properties of charged hadrons obtained from 11500 such events. Significant differences are observed between the properties of the hadrons produced forwards and backwards in the centre-of-mass system, and after studies of the effects of hadronization these differences are found to be mainly attributable to gluon emission by the struck quark, in qualitative agreement with the predictions of QCD. An analysis of the way in which the transverse momentum of hadrons in various regions of rapidity is balanced reveals that the data are in good agreement with the predictions of the Lund model incorporating soft gluon emission. The planar nature of some events and the overall charged hadronic energy flow is found to offer further evidence for the visibility of QCD phenomena in the data. (author)