Unified Treatment of Hadronic Processes Involving High-Mass Virtual Photons

A unified treatment of the three processes: (I) lepton + proton-lepton t hadrons, (IDpro ton + proton-c lepton pair + hadrons , (III)lepton pair-hadrons is presented. Our dynamical model is an off-mass-shell bootstrap theory of the hadrons. We show that the model predicts slow q2 (photon mass squared) variation of the differential cross sections for processes I and II in spite of the fact that the model requires the elastic and quasi-elastic hadronic form factors to de2 crease faster than any power in q . The cross section for process III, however, is predicted to decrease rapidly in q2 and to violate the scaling law observed for process I. More detailed predictions of multiplicities and angular distributions of the final states are made, as well as the surprising predictions that for large q2s the ratio gpp -pp + lepton pair) / *p-ppn+ lepton pair) dq2 dq2 for process II and the ratio o(lepton pairpp)/o(lepton pair-r’ + real photon) for process III should both approach zero. The latter ratio should be comparable to 1 for q2 -6Be . ? * Work supported by the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission. (Submitted to Phys. Rev.)