High $Q^2$ Physics at HERA and Searches for New Particles

Abstract

Preliminary results from H1 and ZEUS on Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) at high momentum transfer squared $Q^2$ are presented. Used are all available $e^+ p$ data accumulated by the H1 and ZEUS experiments between 1994 and 1997, corresponding to integrated luminosities of $37 {pb}^{-1}$ and $47 {pb}^{-1}$, respectively. The anomalies observed at high $Q^2$ in the 1994 to 1996 data still remain, though with less significance. Since this high $Q^2$ domain represents a new frontier in DIS, the same data are used to search for new particles possessing direct couplings to lepton-quark pairs. Assuming that the slight excess of events observed in Neutral Current DIS is due to a statistical fluctuation, preliminary limits on the production of leptoquarks and of squarks in R-parity violating MSSM are presented.