Measurement of the energy dependence of the total photon-proton cross section at HERA

The energy dependence of the photon-proton total cross section, sigma-tot, was determined from ep scattering data collected with the ZEUS detector at HERA at three values of the center-of-mass energy, W, of the gamma-p system in the range 194<W<296 GeV. This is the first determination of the W dependence of sigma-tot from a single experiment at high W. Parameterizing sigma-tot proportional to W^(2 epsilon), epsilon = 0.111 +/- 0.009 (stat.) +/- 0.036 (syst.) was obtained.