Plasma-Wakefield Accelerator Group

Abstract:

At large values of x, the parton distribution functions (PDFs) of the proton are poorly constrained and there are considerable variations between different global fits. Data at such high x have already been published by the ZEUS Collaboration, but not yet used in PDF extractions. A technique for comparing predictions based on different PDF sets to the observed number of events in the ZEUS data is presented. It is applied to compare predictions from the most commonly used PDFs to published ZEUS data at high Bjorken x. A wide variation is found in the ability of the PDFs to predict the observed results. A scheme for including the ZEUS high-x data in future PDF extractions is discussed.

Abstract:

Two-particle azimuthal correlations have been measured in neutral current deep inelastic ep scattering with virtuality Q²> 5 GeV² at a centre-of-mass energy s√s = 318 GeV recorded with the ZEUS detector at HERA. The correlations of charged particles have been measured in the range of laboratory pseudorapidity −1.5 < η < 2.0 and transverse momentum 0.1 < p_T< 5.0 GeV and event multiplicities N_ch up to six times larger than the average 〈N_ch〉 ≈ 5. The two-particle correlations have been measured in terms of the angular observables c_n{2} = 〈〈cosnΔφ〉〉, where n is between 1 and 4 and ∆φ is the relative azimuthal angle between the two particles. Comparisons with available models of deep inelastic scattering, which are tuned to reproduce inclusive particle production, suggest that the measured two-particle correlations are dominated by contributions from multijet production. The correlations observed here do not indicate the kind of collective behaviour recently observed at the highest RHIC and LHC energies in high-multiplicity hadronic collisions.