Charged particle production in high Q2 deep-inelastic scattering at HERA

The average charged track multiplicity and the normalised distribution of the scaled momentum, x p, of charged final state hadrons are measured in deep-inelastic ep scattering at high Q 2 in the Breit frame of reference. The analysis covers the range of photon virtuality 100 < Q 2 < 20 000   GeV 2. Compared with previous results presented by HERA experiments this analysis has a significantly higher statistical precision and extends the phase space to higher Q 2 and to the full range of x p. The results are compared with e + e - annihilation data and with various calculations based on perturbative QCD using different models of the hadronisation process. © 2007.