Two-Photon Processes at Intermediate Energies

Exclusive hadron production processes in photon-photon collisions provide important tests of QCD at the amplitude level, particularly as measures of hadron distribution amplitudes and skewed parton distributions. The determination of the shape and normalization of the distribution amplitudes has become particularly important in view of their importance in the analysis of exclusive semi-leptonic and two-body hadronic B-decays. Interesting two-photon physics, including doubly-tagged $\gamma^* \gamma^*$ reactions, will be accessible at low energy, high luminosity $e^+ e^-$ colliders, including measurements of channels important in the light-by-light contribution to the muon $g$--2 and the study of the transition between threshold production controlled by low-energy effective chiral theories and the domain where leading-twist perturbative QCD becomes applicable. The threshold regime of hadron production in photon-photon and $e^+ e^-$ annihilation, where hadrons are formed at small relative velocity, is particularly interesting as a test of low energy theorems, soliton models, and new types of resonance production. Such studies will be particularly valuable in double-tagged reactions where polarization correlations, as well as the photon virtuality dependence, can be studied.