Photoproduction of Hadron Pairs at Fixed-Target Experiments

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production of hadron pairs in polarized lepton-nucleon collisions using next-to-leading order perturbative QCD, providing predictions for experiments like COMPASS and HERMES.

Contribution

It offers a detailed phenomenological analysis of hadron pair photoproduction at high transverse momenta, including theoretical predictions and uncertainty estimates.

Findings

Predicted cross sections for hadron pair production at COMPASS and HERMES.

Quantified theoretical uncertainties in the predictions.

Demonstrated how to extract relevant observables from the theoretical framework.

Abstract

We consider the photoproduction of two hadrons in polarized lepton-nucleon collisions in the framework of perturbative QCD at the next-to-leading order accuracy. After illustrating how to obtain the experimentally relevant observables, a phenomenological study of the photoproduction of hadron pairs at high transverse momenta is presented. We show theoretical predictions for the relevant cross sections at COMPASS and HERMES kinematics as well as theoretical uncertainties.