Tests of low scale gravity via gauge boson pair production in γγ collisions -: art. no. 115010

Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos, and Dvali have recently proposed that gravity may become strong at energies near 1 TeV thus removing the hierarchy problem. This scenario can be tested in several ways at present and future colliders. In this paper we examine the exchange of towers of Kaluza-Klein gravitons and their influence on the production of pairs of massive gauge bosons in gamma gamma collisions. These tower exchanges are shown to lead to a new dimension-eight operator that can significantly alter the standard model expectations for these processes. The role of polarization for both the initial state photons and the final-state gauge bosons in improving sensitivity to graviton exchange is emphasized. We find the discovery reach for graviton tower exchange in the gamma gamma --> W+W- channel to be significantly greater than for any other process so far examined. [S0556-2821(99)04321-0].