Introduction

In 1993, electrons of 26.7 GeV and protons of 820 GeV were brought into collision at HERA. 84 paired bunches out of 210 possible were filled and in addition 10 electron and 6 proton bunches were left unpaired for background studies.

The measurements described here were made using the ZEUS detector, which is described in detail in [1] and [2]. The main components used for our analyses were the vertex detector (VXD), the central tracking detector (CTD), the uranium calorimeter (CAL), a lead scintillator beam monitor (C5) and the luminosity detector.

With the data taken in 1993 a measurement of the proton structure function F₂ was possible with high precision in a region of 7 < Q² < 10⁴ GeV² and x values as low as . The total integrated luminosity in 1993 was 0.54 pb^-1.