Photoproduction of charged hadrons at large transverse momenta

Abstract A quantitative test of QCD from high energy photoproduction of large transverse momentum charged hadrons, using incident γ energies between 50 and 150 GeV, is presented. The inclusive hadron P 1 and P t distributions show a clear excess over the VDM contribution. This excess is found to be in good agreement with second-order QCD calculations. This agreement does not depend critically on the choice of the gluon fragmentation function, and is observed over the large kinematical domain covered by this experiment.