Two-photon annihilation into pion pairs

Abstract

We discuss pion pair production in two-photon collisions in two different kinematical regimes. When both photons are real and at moderately large center-of-mass energy s we elaborate on partonic transverse momentum and Sudakov corrections within the hard scattering approach. We also point out the difference between our approach and that of other authors. When one of the photons is highly virtual the produced pion pair can be described in terms of a two-pion distribution amplitude, for which we derive the perturbative limit at large s.

Latex, 7 pages, 6 Postscript figures, Talk given at "PHOTON2000", Ambleside, UK, August 2000; to appear in the proceedings. Eq. (2) and typo corrected