The production of charged hadrons and K_s mesons in the collisions of quasi-real photons has been measured using the OPAL detector at LEP. The data were taken at e+e- centre-of-mass energies of 161 and 172 GeV. The differential cross-sections as a function of the transverse momentum and the pseudorapidity of the charged hadrons and K_s mesons have been compared to the leading order Monte Carlo simulations of PHOJET and PYTHIA and to perturbative next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD calculations. The distributions have been measured in the range 10-125 GeV of the hadronic invariant mass W. By comparing the transverse momentum distribution of charged hadrons measured in gamma-gamma interactions with gamma-proton and meson-proton data we find evidence for hard photon interactions in addition to the purely hadronic photon interactions.
Vector meson production is studied in the reaction γγ→K+K−π+π−. A clear Φ(1020) signal is seen in theK+K− mass distribution and aK*0 (890) signal is visible in theK±π∓ one. Both do not seem to be strongly correlated with quasi two body final states. Cross sections for the processes γγ→K+K−π+π−, γγ→Φπ+π−, γγ→K+0K±π∓ and upper limits for the production of Φp, ΦΦ andK*0\(\overline {K^{ * 0} } \) are given as function of the invariant γγ mass.
We have observed exclusive production of K + K − and K S O K S O pairs and the excitation of the f′(1515) tensor meson in photon-photon collisions. Assuming the f′ to be production in a helicity 2 state, we determine Λ( f ′ → γγ) B( f ′ → K K ) = 0.11 ± 0.02 ± 0.04 keV . The non-strange quark of the f′ is found to be less than 3% (95% CL). For the θ(1640) we derive an upper limit for the product Λ(θ rarr; γγ K K ) < 0.03 keV (95% CL ) .
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