Physics Opportunities at a Photon-Photon Collider
Abstract
The advent of back-scattered laser beams for electron-positron colliders will allow detailed studies of a large array of high energy photon-photon and photon-electron collision processes with polarized beams. These include tests of electroweak theory in photon-photon annihilation such as γ γ W+ W-, γ γ Higgs bosons, and higher-order loop processes, such as γ γ γ γ, Z γ, H0 Z0 and Z Z. Methods for measuring the anomalous magnetic and quadrupole moments of the W and Z gauge bosons to high precision in polarized electron-photon and photon-photon collisions are discussed. Since each photon can be resolved into a W+ W- pair, high energy photon-photon collisions can also provide a remarkably background-free laboratory for studying W W collisions and annihilation. I also review high energy γ γ and e γ tests of quantum chromodynamics, including the production of two gluon jets in photon-photon collisions, deeply virtual Compton scattering on a photon target, and leading-twist single-spin asymmetries for a photon polarized normal to a production plane. Exclusive hadron production processes in photon-photon collisions provide important tests of QCD at the amplitude level, particularly as measures of hadron distribution amplitudes which are also important for the analysis of exclusive semi-leptonic and two-body hadronic B-decays.
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