Measurement of azimuthal asymmetries in neutral current deep inelastic scattering at HERA

The distribution of the azimuthal angle of charged and neutral hadrons relative to the lepton plane has been studied for neutral current deep inelastic ep scattering using an integrated luminosity of 45 pb(-1) taken with the ZEUS detector. The kinematic range is 100 < Q(2) < 8000 GeV2, 0.2 < y < 0.8 and 0.01 < x < 0.1 where Q(2) is the virtuality of the exchanged boson, y is the inelasticity and x is the Bjorken variable. The measurements were made in the hadronic centre-of-mass system. The analysis exploits the energy-flow method, which allows the measurement to be made over a larger range of pseudorapidity compared to previous results. The dependence of the moments of the azimuthal distributions on the pseudorapidity and minimum transverse energy of the. final-state hadrons are presented. Although the predictions from next-to-leading-order QCD describe the data better than do the Monte Carlo models incorporating leading-logarithm parton showers, they still fail to describe the magnitude of the asymmetries. This suggests that higher-order calculations may be necessary to describe these data.