A fresh look at exclusive electroproduction of light vector mesons

TL;DR

This paper shows that using collinear factorization, H1 and ZEUS data on exclusive light vector meson production can be explained for Q > 2 GeV, highlighting the importance of quark exchanges and a small gluonic skewness ratio.

Contribution

It provides a unified description of experimental data using collinear factorization, emphasizing the role of quark exchanges and gluonic skewness in small x regions.

Findings

Quark exchanges are significant at small x_{Bj}

Gluonic skewness ratio is much less than one at leading order

Experimental data can be simultaneously described for Q > 2 GeV

Abstract

Relying on the collinear factorization approach, we demonstrate that H1 and ZEUS measurements of exclusive light vector meson and photon electroproduction cross sections can be simultaneously described for photon virtualities of $Q >2 GeV$. Our findings reveal that quark exchanges are important in this small $x_{Bj}$ region and that in leading order approximation the gluonic skewness ratio is much smaller than one.