Photoproduction Cross Sections at HERA Energies

Abstract

We show that photoproduction cross sections recently measured by ZEUS and H-1 at HERA energies$^1$ are in agreement with our earlier prediction based on high-energy hadronic structure of the photon in the QCD minijet-type model$^2$. We present results of an improved calculation of the photoproduction cross section, in which the soft part, motivated by the Regge theory, is taken to be energy-dependent and the semi-hard hadronic part is carefully eikonalized to take into account for the multiple scatterings and to include the appropriate probability that photon would act hadronicaly$^3$. We also show that the extrapolation of our cross section to ultra-high energies, of relevance to the cosmic ray physics, gives significant contribution to the ``conventional'' value, but cannot account for the anomalous muon content observed in the cosmic ray air-showers associated with astrophysical point sources$^4$.