Measurement of the photon structure function F(x, Q) in the region 0.2< Q<7 GeV.

We present a measurement of the photon structure function F in the reaction ee→eeX for Q in the range 0.2< Q<7 GeV, using 9,200 multihadron events obtained with the TPC/Two-Gamma detector at PEP. The data have been corrected for detector effects using a regularized unfolding procedure and are presented as a function of x and Q. The structure function shows scaling in the region 0.3< Q<1.6 GeV, x<0.3 and rises for higher Q. At Q=5.1 GeV the results are compared with QCD and, within the scheme of Antoniadis and Grunberg, rather conservative bounds for the QCD scale parameter of 133±50< $$\Lambda _{\overline {{\rm M}S} } $$ <268±98 MeV are obtained. A study of the final state structure shows that the rise of F is consistent with being entirely due to the pointlike component of the photon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]