Measurement of beauty quark production from dimuon events with the ZEUS detector at HERA II

In this thesis, a measurement of beauty quark production via the process ep→e'b anti bX→e'μμX in electron-proton collisions at HERA using a data sample recorded by the ZEUS detector in the years 2003-2007, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 376 pb-1, is presented. A low transverse momentum threshold for muon identification in combination with the large rapidity coverage of the ZEUS muon-detection system gives access to essentially the full phase space for beauty quark production. Dimuon charge correlations as well as hadronic isolation and the mass of the dimuon system were used to separate the beauty signal from backgrounds. Visible, differential and total cross sections for beauty quark production were measured and compared to next-to-leading order QCD calculations and previous measurements. In addition, a first search for QCD instanton-induced processes containing both a charm- and beauty-quark pair in dimuon events was performed. In order to differentiate between beauty and instanton events, discriminating observables sensitive to the hadronic final state, so-called event shape variables, were used in combination with the dimuon requirement. As technical part of this thesis, the reconstruction algorithm for so-called energy flow objects (EFOs) was modified. EFOs contain the combined information of primary and secondary vertex-fitted tracks as well as CAL energy measurements. The modification considers additional tracks close to but not fitted to the primary vertex and which fulfill reasonable track and impact parameter requirements. As a result, the efficiency to reconstruct muon candidates with high impact parameter values as energy flow objects was increased. (orig.)