We present results of an experimental study of e+e−+ hadrons in the kinematic regime for which the process is interpreted as hadron production in collisions of almost-real photons. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 27.5 pb− and covers center-of-mass energies from 55 to 61.4 GeV. We observe more events than expected from the incoherent sum of quark-parton and vector-meson-dominance models, and we give a quantitative explanation of the excess by including the hard scattering of the hadronic constituents of the photons calculated with QCD.

Evidence for hard scattering of hadronic constituents of photons in photon-photon collisions of TRISTAN