Study of Photon-Photon Interactions via Electron-Electron and Electron-Positron Colliding Beams

Abstract

Some techniques are presented for studying the virtual photon-photon interaction available through electron-electron and electron-positron colliding beams. The two-photon processes are analyzed with the helicity methods presented before by Muzinich, Wang, and Wang, and with invariant amplitudes in the special case of forward elastic photon-photon scattering. A discussion of the high-energy behavior of some particular hadron production amplitudes as determined by Regge theory is given. In particular, we emphasize the possibility of measuring the real photon-photon hadron production cross sections. If only the final lepton momenta are measured and one attempts to isolate the total real photon-photon cross section into hadrons, there are electromagnetic background effects that may make this measurement difficult.