Eur. Phys. J. C 24, 245-260 (2002)
DOI: 10.1007/s100520200921

A next-to-leading order study of pion-pair production and comparison with E706 data

T. Binoth¹, J.Ph. Guillet², E. Pilon² and M. Werlen<sup>2

1</sup>  Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, UK
²  Laboratoire d'Annecy-Le-Vieux de Physique Théorique LAPTH, Chemin de Bellevue, B.P. 110, 74941 Annecy-le-Vieux, France

(Received: 8 November 2001 / Published online: 5 April 2002 - © Springer-Verlag / Società Italiana di Fisica 2002 )

Abstract
We discuss the production of pion pairs with a large invariant mass in hadronic collisions. We present a study based on a perturbative QCD calculation at full next-to-leading order accuracy, implemented in the computer programme DIPHOX . We provide a comparison of various predictions with the corresponding observables measured by the E706 fixed target experiment. Discrepancies between data and next-to-leading order calculation are carefully analysed. We classify the theoretical next-to-leading order distributions with respect to their infrared sensitivity, and explain which distributions need improvements. Further, we comment on the energy scale dependences of non pertubative effects.

© Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag 2002