High Energy Photon-Photon Collisions at a Linear Collider

Abstract

High intensity back-scattered laser beams will allow the efficient conversion of a substantial fraction of the incident lepton energy into high energy photons, thus significantly extending the physics capabilities of an electron-electron or electron-positron linear collider. The annihilation of two photons produces C=+ final states in virtually all angular momentum states. The annihilation of polarized photons into the Higgs boson determines its fundamental two-photon coupling as well as determining its parity. Other novel two-photon processes include the two-photon production of charged lepton pairs, vector boson pairs, as well as supersymmetric squark and slepton pairs and Higgstrahlung. The one-loop box diagram leads to the production of pairs of neutral particles. High energy photon-photon collisions can also provide a remarkably background-free laboratory for studying possibly anomalous $WW$ collisions and annihilation. In the case of QCD, each photon can materialize as a quark anti-quark pair which interact via multiple gluon exchange. The diffractive channels in photon-photon collisions allow a novel look at the QCD pomeron and odderon. Odderon exchange can be identified by looking at the heavy quark asymmetry. In the case of electron-photon collisions, one can measure the photon structure functions and its various components. Exclusive hadron production processes in photon-photon collisions test QCD at the amplitude level and measure the hadron distribution amplitudes which control exclusive semi-leptonic and two-body hadronic B-decays.

Invited talk, presented at the 5th International Workshop On Electron-Electron Interactions At TeV Energies, Santa Cruz, California, 12-14 December 2003

References in corpus (11)

• Light-Front Hadron Dynamics and AdS/CFT Correspondence
• Perturbative QCD Analysis of the Nucleon's Pauli Form Factor F_2(Q^2)
• On the Behavior of the Effective QCD Coupling alpha_tau(s) at Low Scales
• Single-Spin Polarization Effects and the Determination of Timelike Proton Form Factors
• Muon-Pair and Tau-Pair Production in Two-Photon Collisions at LEP
• Inclusive Charged Hadron Production in Two-Photon Collisions at LEP
• Proton-Antiproton Pair Production in Two-Photon Collisions at LEP
• Physics at a gamma gamma, e gamma and e-e- Option for a Linear Collider
• ECFA-Summary: Higgs, gamma-gamma and e-gamma physics
• Complementarity of a Low Energy Photon Collider and LHC Physics
• Two-Photon Physics at LEP

Cited by in corpus (4)

• CP-odd Higgs Boson Production in $e\gamma$ Collisions
• Introduction to the Photon Collider
• Testing Higgs Physics at the Photon Collider
• Higgs production in $e$ and real $\gamma$ collision