Abstract submitted to the
         International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics
                  July 12 - 18, 2001, Budapest, Hungary
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           Measurement of phi(1020) meson production in neutral current 
                       deep inelastic scattering at HERA

                    
                               ZEUS Collaboration





                                    Abstract


        First results on inclusive phi(1020) meson production in neutral 
        current DIS have been obtained with the ZEUS detector at HERA 
        using an integrated luminosity of 45 pb^{-1}. Cross sections have 
        been measured in the range of the virtuality of the exchanged 
        photon, Q^2 > 10 GeV^2, and in restricted kinematic regions in 
        transverse momentum, p_T, and pseudorapidity of the phi(1020) 
        meson. The measured cross sections are compared to leading-order
        Monte Carlo predictions with different parameterisations of the 
        strange sea in the proton.