Recent Results in Prompt Photon Production.pdfVIP

a r X i v : h e p - e x / 0 5 1 1 0 3 5 v 1 1 3 N o v 2 0 0 5 Recent Results in Prompt Photon Production? JO?RG GAYLER DESY An introduction is given to recent results in prompt photon production in dif- ferent reactions. PACS numbers: PACS numbers come here 1. Introduction Light played always a key role in the attempts to understand early states of hadronic matter. In early reports on the creation of the world [1], light provided clarity and structure. Nowadays, we can see the universe back to some 105 years after the big bang by observation of light. In the microscopic world photons tell us about the original hard interactions through fire balls created in nucleus-nucleus collisions. Photons also give a rather clear message on partonic patterns, in contrast to quarks and gluons which are not directly observable. Only the last two point will be further discussed in this report. Usually photons are called ”prompt” (or ”direct”), if they are coupling to in- teracting partons, in contrast to photons from hadron decays or photons emitted by leptons. Figs. 1 shows examples of leading order (LO) graphs of prompt photon emissions in ep and hadron-hadron interactions. The ep interactions in Figs. 1a) Fig. 1. Examples of LO graphs for prompt photon production in γp (a,b) and hadron- hadron interactions (c,d). and b) are called photoproduction, if the photon virtuality Q2 is small, (typically ? Invited talk at Photon2005, 31st - 4th September, Warsaw (1) 2 GAYLER PRINTED ON FEBRUARY 7, 2008 1 GeV2), which means in case of the HERA experiments [2, 3] that the scat- tered electron stays in the beam pipe. The photon can interact directly (Fig. 1a) or fluctuate into a hadronic state, part of which interacts with the incident proton (Fig. 1b). There is substantial interest in the observation of prompt photons as they are more directly related to partonic interactions than jets and sensitive to the gluon content of the interacting particles (resolved photon and proton, Figs.