A study of the inclusive charged hadron production in two-photon collisions is described. The data were collected with the DELPHI detector at LEP II. Results on the inclusive single-particle p_T distribution and the differential charged hadrons dsigma/dp_T cross-section are presented and compared to the predictions of perturbative NLO QCD calculations and to published results.
Hadron production in single and central diffraction dissociation is studied in a model which includes soft hadron interaction as controlled by a supercritical pomeron parametrization and hard diffraction. Within this model, particle production in collisions with pomerons exhibit properties like multiple soft interactions and multiple minijets, quite similar to hadron production in non-diffractive hadronic collisions at high energies. However, important differences occur in transverse momentum jet and hadron distributions. It is shown that the model is able to describe data from the CERN-SPS collider and from the HERA collider. Model predictions are presented for single and central diffraction at TEVATRON.
The DELPHI Collaboration has recently reported the measurement of J/Psi production in photon-photon collisions at LEP II. These newly available data provide an additional proof of the importance of colored c bar{c} pairs for the production of charmonium because these data can only be explained by considering resolved photon processes. We show here that the inclusion of color octet contributions to the J/Psi production in the framework of the color evaporation model is able to reproduce this data. In particular, the transverse-momentum distribution of the J/Psi mesons is well described by this model.
We study inclusive charged-hadron production in collisions of quasireal photons at NLO in perturbative QCD, using fragmentation functions recently extracted from PEP and LEP1 data. We superimpose the direct (DD), single-resolved (DR), and double-resolved (RR) gamma-gamma channels. First, we confront existing data taken by TASSO at PETRA and by MARK II at PEP with our NLO calculations. We also make comparisons with the neutral-kaon to charged-hadron ratio measured by MARK II. Then, we present NLO predictions for LEP2, a next-generation e+e- linear collider (NLC) in the TESLA design, and a Compton collider obtained by converting a NLC. We analyze transverse-momentum and rapidity spectra with regard to the scale dependence, the interplay of the DD, DR, and RR components, the sensitivity to the gluon density in the resolved photon, and the influence of gluon fragmentation. It turns out that the inclusive measurement of small-p_T hadrons at a Compton collider would greatly constrain the gluon density of the photon and the gluon fragmentation function.
The most precise measurement of the weak mixing angle sin^2(theta) at LEP is from the forward-backward asymmetry e+e- --> bbbar at the Z-pole. In this note the QED and electroweak radiative corrections to obtain the pole asymmetry from the measured asymmetry for b- and c-quarks have been calculated using ZFITTER, which has been amended to allow a consistent treatment of partial two-loop corrections for the b-quark final asymmetries. A total correction of dAfbb=0.0019+/-0.0002 and dAfbc=0.0064+/-0.0001 has been found, where the remaining theoretical uncertainty is much too small to explain the apparent discrepancy between sin^2(theta) obtained from Afbb and from the left-right asymmetry at SLD.