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Inclusive Hadron Production in Photon-Photon Collisions at Next-to-Leading Order

We study inclusive charged-hadron production in collisions of quasireal photons at NLO in perturbative QCD, using fragmentation functions recently extracted from PEP and LEP1 data. We superimpose the direct (DD), single-resolved (DR), and double-resolved (RR) gamma-gamma channels. First, we confront existing data taken by TASSO at PETRA and by MARK II at PEP with our NLO calculations. We also make comparisons with the neutral-kaon to charged-hadron ratio measured by MARK II. Then, we present NLO predictions for LEP2, a next-generation e+e- linear collider (NLC) in the TESLA design, and a Compton collider obtained by converting a NLC. We analyze transverse-momentum and rapidity spectra with regard to the scale dependence, the interplay of the DD, DR, and RR components, the sensitivity to the gluon density in the resolved photon, and the influence of gluon fragmentation. It turns out that the inclusive measurement of small-p_T hadrons at a Compton collider would greatly constrain the gluon density of the photon and the gluon fragmentation function.