Two-photon couplings of hybrid mesons

A new formalism is developed for the two-photon production of hybrid mesons via intermediate hadronic decays. In an adiabatic and non-relativistic context with spin-1 <Q(Q)over bar> pair creation we obtain the first absolute estimates of unmixed hybrid production strengths to be small (less than or similar to 0.03-3 eV) in relation to experimental meson widths (similar to 0.1-5 keV). Within this context, gamma gamma experiments at Babar, Cleo II, LEP2 and LHC therefore strongly discriminate between hybrid and conventional meson wave function components, filtering out conventional meson components, Decay widths of unmixed hybrids vanish, Conventional meson two-photon widths are roughly in agreement with experiment. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.