Abundant phi-Meson Production in pbar-p Annihilation at Rest and Strangeness in the Nucleon

Abstract

A large apparent violation of the OZI rule has recently been found in many channels in pbar-p annihilation LEAR. An interpretation of these data in terms of the "shake-out" and "rearrangement" of an intrinsic sbar-s component of the nucleon wave function is proposed. This gives a channel-dependent, non-universal modification of the naive OZI prediction. Within this approach, we interpret the strong excess of $\phi$ production in S-wave pbar-p annihilations in terms of the polarization of the nucleon's sbar-s component indicated by deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering experiments. This interpretation could be tested by measurements of the $f_2'(1525)/f_2(1270)$ production ratio in P-wave annihilations and by experiments with polarized beams and polarized targets. We also propose a test of the intrinsic strangeness hypothesis in $\phi$ production in high-momentum transfer processes, via a difference in constituent counting rules from gluon-mediated production.