DESY 06-164 ISSN 0418-9833 October 2006

Measurements are presented of diffractive open charm production at HERA. The event topology is given by ep eXY where the system X contains at least one charmed hadron and is well separated by a large rapidity gap from a leading low-mass proton remnant system Y . Two analysis techniques are used for the cross section measurements. In the first, the charm quark is tagged by the reconstruction of a D # (2010) meson. This technique is used in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) and photoproduction (#p). In the second, a method based on the displacement of tracks from the primary vertex is used to measure the open charm contribution to the inclusive diffractive cross section in DIS. The measurements are compared with next-to-leading order QCD predictions based on diffractive parton density functions previously obtained from a QCD analysis of the inclusive diffractive cross section at H1. A good agreement is observed in the full kinematic regime, which supports the validity of QCD factorization for open charm production in diffractive DIS and #p

Ancient Charm: A research project for neutron-based investigation of cultural heritage objects

The objectives and methodology of the Ancient Charm project are briefly described with reference to the state of the art in neutron-based analysis of cultural-heritage objects. The project is expected to develop a set of complementary 3D imaging methods, which will be applied to objects of high cultural-heritage significance selected as a result of a broad-scope archaeological research