Professor Claire Gwenlan

Abstract:

Previously published data on inclusive neutral and charged current e+ p and e- p deep inelastic scattering from HERA have been combined. The new, model-independent method of combining the measured cross sections takes full account of correlated systematics in a coherent way, leading to significantly reduced uncertainties in the combined measurement across the (x, Q2) plane. The combined cross section data have been used as the sole input for a new next-to-leading order QCD fit to extract the parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton. The PDFs extracted have greatly reduced experimental uncertainties, compared to separate QCD analyses on data from H1 and ZEUS. Model uncertainties, including those arising from the parameterisation dependence, have also been carefully considered. The resulting HERA PDFs have impressive precision. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract:

Recent ZEUS measurements of inclusive-jet and dijet cross sections in neutral current deep inelastic ep scattering at HERA are presented. The data correspond to more than a two-fold increase in statistics compared to previous studies. The cross sections are measured in the Breit frame, for boson virtualities of Q2 > 125 GeV2, as functions of various kinematic and jet observables. The data are found to be well described by NLO QCD and have the potential to constrain the gluon density in the proton. Two new extractions of the strong coupling, αs, are also presented: the first is determined from the inclusive-jet neutral current DIS measurement presented here, while the second is from a re-analysis of previously published data on inclusive jet photoproduction. Both measurements are of competitive precision and in agreement with the world average.