STUDY OF BARYON PRODUCTION MECHANISM IN E(-) ANNIHILATION INTO HADRONS()E()

The mechanism of baryon-anti-baryon pair production in e(+)e(-) annihi lation into hadrons has been studied using the TOPAZ detector at the T RISTAN e(+)e(-) collider at an average center-of-mass energy of 58 GeV . The distributions of various (p) over bar p correlations were compar ed with two prominent models: the cluster-fragmentation model and the string-fragmentation model. We rejected the cluster-fragmentation mode l at the 90% C.L. Furthermore, in the context of the string-fragmentat ion model, we favor the ''popcorn'' model, rejecting the ''diquark'' m odel, where a diquark is considered to be a fundamental entity, at the 95% C.L. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reser ved.