Measurement of the longitudinal proton structure function at HERA

Abstract

The reduced cross sections for ep deep inelastic scattering have been measured with the ZEUS detector at HERA at three different centre-of-mass energies, 318, 251 and 225 GeV. From the cross sections, measured double differentially in Bjorken x and the virtuality, Q 2, the proton structure functions FL and F2 have been extracted in the region 5×10−4 <x <0.007 and 20 <Q 2 <130 GeV2.