Study of baryon production mechanism in e+e− annihilation into hadrons

The mechanism of baryon-anti-baryon pair production in e+e− annihilation into hadrons has been studied using the TOPAZ detector at the TRISTAN e+e− collider at an average center-of-mass energy of 58 GeV. The distributions of various pp correlations were compared with two prominent models: the cluster-fragmentation model and the string-fragmentation model. We rejected the cluster-fragmentation model at the 90% C.L. Furthermore, in the context of the string-fragmentation model, we favor the “popcorn” model, rejecting the “diquark” model, where a diquark is considered to be a fundamental entity, at the 95% C.L.