Next-to-leading order corrections in exclusive meson production

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of next-to-leading order corrections on exclusive meson production, revealing significant effects at small xB and in certain polarization asymmetries, with implications for theoretical predictions and experimental analyses.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of NLO corrections in exclusive meson production within the collinear factorization framework, highlighting their large size at small xB and their influence on polarization asymmetries.

Findings

NLO corrections are huge at small xB.

Radiative corrections significantly affect transverse target polarization asymmetry.

Size of effects varies between rho and omega meson channels.

Abstract

We analyze in detail the size of next-to-leading order corrections to hard exclusive meson production within the collinear factorization approach. Corrections to the cross section are found to be huge at small xB and substantial in typical fixed-target kinematics. With the models we take for nucleon helicity-flip distributions, the transverse target polarization asymmetry in vector meson production is strongly affected by radiative corrections, except at large xB. Its overall size is very small for rho production but can be large in the omega channel.