NEW PROBES FOR EXTENDED GAUGE STRUCTURES AT THE DESY EP COLLIDER HERA

Doncheski and Hewett have recently shown that the ratio of neutral current to charged current cross sections, R = sigma(NC)/sigma(CC), can provide a more sensitive probe for the existence of heavy leptoquarks at the DESY ep collider HERA than the usual procedure which makes use of neutral current asymmetries. The apparent reason for this is that the standard model expectations for both of these cross sections are modified by the existence of such particles in a semicoherent manner. In this paper we apply this technique to extended electroweak models whose spectrum contains both a W' and a Z'. We find that measurements of R can, for some models, substantially increase the HERA search range for new gauge bosons beyond that which can be probed using the more conventional asymmetries.