Photoproduction of $\omega$ mesons off nuclei and impact of polarization on meson-nucleon interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the polarization of omega mesons affects their interaction with nucleons during photoproduction off nuclei, providing insights into polarization-dependent cross sections relevant for upcoming experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a method to extract the longitudinally polarized meson-nucleon cross section from incoherent photoproduction data, which has not been measured before.

Findings

Proposes a way to measure the polarization-dependent cross sections.

Highlights the importance of polarization in meson-nucleon interactions.

Supports upcoming experimental efforts at Jefferson Lab.

Abstract

We consider photoproduction of $\omega$ mesons off complex nuclei to study interactions of transversely and longitudinally polarized vector mesons with nucleons. Whereas the total cross section for interactions of the transversely polarized vector mesons with nucleons $\sigma_T=\sigma(V_TN)$ can be obtained from coherent photoproduction, measurements of vector meson photoproduction in the incoherent region provide a unique opportunity to extract the total cross section for longitudinally polarized mesons interacting with nucleons $\sigma_L=\sigma(V_LN)$, which has not yet been measured and strongly depends on theoretical approaches. This work is stimulated by the construction of the new experiment GlueX at Jefferson Lab, designed to study the photoproduction of mesons in a large beam energy range up to 12 GeV.