Electroproduction of tensor mesons in QCD

TL;DR

This paper provides an improved QCD analysis of tensor meson electroproduction, incorporating twist-three operators and soft corrections, successfully matching experimental data and scaling behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a refined QCD framework including twist-three and soft corrections for tensor meson production, aligning theory with recent experimental measurements.

Findings

Predicted scaling behavior matches experimental data

Inclusion of twist-three operators improves accuracy

Soft end-point corrections are significant for precise results

Abstract

Due to multiple possible polarizations hard exclusive production of tensor mesons by virtual photons or in heavy meson decays offers interesting possibilities to study the helicity structure of the underlying short-distance process. Motivated by the first measurement of the transition form factor $\gamma^*\gamma \to f_2(1270)$ at large momentum transfers by the BELLE collaboration we present an improved QCD analysis of this reaction in the framework of collinear factorization including contributions of twist-three quark-antiquark-gluon operators and an estimate of soft end-point corrections using light-cone sum rules. The results appear to be in a very good agreement with the data, in particular the predicted scaling behavior is reproduced in all cases.