Recent Results on Charm Photoproduction.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - e x / 0 0 1 0 0 5 0 v 1 1 9 O c t 2 0 0 0 Recent Results on Charm Photoproduction Don Hochman? 1 On behalf of the ZEUS Collaboration ?Weizmann Institute of Science,Rehovot Israel 76100 Abstract. Photoproduction of D±s mesons has been measured in the ZEUS detector at HERA and compared with predictions of NLO pQCD calculations. The ratio ofD?±s to D?± cross sections has been compared to results from e+e? experiments. Orbitally excited P-wave charm mesons have been observed in the D?±π? final state. The fraction of D?± ’s originating from these mesons has been calculated and compared with that from e+e? interactions. No evidence for radially excited mesons decaying to D?±π+π? was found. The inelastic production of J/ψ mesons has been measured and compared to LO and NLO pQCD predictions. INTRODUCTION Charm photoproduction measurements have been performed at the HERA ep collider in the ZEUS detector from data taken during 1995-2000. Electrons or positrons with energy Ee = 27.5GeV collided with protons of energy Ep = 820GeV (1995-1997) or Ep = 920GeV (1998-2000). The ZEUS detector description can be found elsewhere [1]. The decay chain Ds ± → φπ± → K+K?π± (38pb?1 integrated luminosity) was studied [2] as a continuation of a previous analysis of charm photoproduction [3]. The study of D±s photoproduction provides another test of next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD) calculations. Orbitally excited P-wave D mesons can decay to a D? by pion emission. Two of these states (D1(2420) and D ? 2(2460)) have been found to decay into narrow states [4] with properties predicted by Heavy Quark Effective Theory (HQET) [5] and a third broad state has been seen by the CLEO collaboration [6]. A radial excitation of the D?± with a mass of about 2.6 GeV decaying into D?±π+π? has been reported by DELPHI [7] but not seen by OPAL and CLEO [8,9]. Inelastic J/ψ photoproduction proceeds via direct (resolved) processes, where the virtual ph