Inclusive production of lambdas and antilambdas in γp interactions, for photon energies between 25 and 70 GeV

Abstract Results are presented on the inclusive photoproduction of λ and λ for incident photon energies between 25 and 70 GeV. The slope parameter of the p T 2 distribution is found to be 2.83±0.1 GeV −2 for λ and 3.28±0.25 GeV −2 for λ . The x F distributions, measured in the range −0.2 to 0.7, show that while λ are produced centrally, λ production extends to more negative values of x F ; the shapes show no energy dependence and are similar to those in pion-induced reactions. The polarization of the produced λ is less than 10%. The results are discussed in terms of vector dominance and quark fusion models.