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First insight into transverse-momentum-dependent fragmentation physics at photon-photon colliders

Simone Anedda1,2,*, Francesco Murgia2,†, and Cristian Pisano1,2,‡

  • *Contact author: sanedda@dsf.unica.it
  • †Contact author: francesco.murgia@ca.infn.it
  • ‡Contact author: cristian.pisano@unica.it
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 014013 – Published 7 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/p6w2-dn9z

Abstract

Future planned lepton colliders, both in the circular and linear configurations, can effectively work as virtual and quasireal photon-photon colliders and are expected to stimulate an intense physics program in the next few years. In this paper, we suggest to consider photon-photon scattering as a useful source of information on transverse-momentum-dependent fragmentation functions (TMD FFs), complementing semi-inclusive deeply inelastic scattering and e+e− annihilation processes, which provide most of the present phenomenological information on TMD FFs. As a first illustrative example, we study two-hadron azimuthal asymmetries around the jet thrust axis in the process ℓ+ℓ−→γ*γ→qq¯→h1h2+X, in which in a circular lepton collider one tagged, deeply virtual photon scatters off an untagged quasireal photon, both originating from the initial lepton beams, producing inclusively an almost back-to-back light-hadron pair with large transverse momentum, in the γ*γ center-of-mass frame. Similar processes, in a more complicated environment due to the presence of initial hadronic states, can also be studied in ultraperipheral collisions at the LHC and the planned future hadron colliders.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 014013– Published 7 July, 2025
  • Received 29 April 2025
  • Accepted 9 June 2025
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