A study of two-photon production of two-body final states with invariant mass greater than 2.0 GeV

Abstract We have measured the electron, muon, and charged-hadron pair production rates in two-phonon interactions for invariant masses above 2.0 GeV over a large of momentum transfer. The cross sections for electron and muon pairs show good agreement with the QED predictions at both small and large momentum transfer. The observed rate of hadron production is less than 6% of the rate that QED predicts for point-like hadrons, consistent with recent leading-order QCD calculations.