Abundant φ-meson production in pp annihilation at rest and strangeness in the nucleon

A large apparent violation of the OZI rule has recently been found in many channels in pp annihilation at LEAR. An interpretation of these data in terms of the “shake-out” and “rearrangement” of an intrinsic ss component of the nucleon wave function is proposed. This gives a channel-dependent, non-universal modification of the naïve OZI prediction. Within this approach, we interpret the strong excess of φ production in S-wave pp annihilations in terms of the polarization of the nucleonʹs ss component indicated by deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering experiments. This interpretation could be tested by measurements of ss meson production ratios in pp annihilation at rest and by experiments with polarized beams and polarized targets. We also propose a test of the intrinsic strangeness hypothesis in φ production in high-momentum transfer processes, via a difference in constituent counting rules from gluon-mediated production.