Exclusive vector meson production with leading neutrons in a saturation model for the dipole amplitude in mixed space

TL;DR

This paper models exclusive rho meson production with leading neutrons at HERA using a saturation model in mixed space, providing insights into absorption effects and comparing with coordinate space approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-space dipole-pion scattering amplitude based on the saturation model, offering a new perspective on absorption effects in vector meson production.

Findings

Absorption $K$ factors are consistent with previous semi-inclusive process predictions.

The mixed-space approach yields results comparable to coordinate space models.

The model estimates the magnitude of absorption effects in the process.

Abstract

We investigate $\rho$ vector meson production in $ep$ collisions at HERA with leading neutrons in the dipole formalism. The interaction of the dipole and the pion is described in a mixed-space approach, in which the dipole-pion scattering amplitude is given by the Marquet-Peschanski-Soyez saturation model, which is based on the travelling wave solutions of the nonlinear Balitsky-Kovchegov equation. We estimate the magnitude of the absorption effects and compare our results with a previous analysis of the same process in full coordinate space. In contrast with this approach, the present study leads to absorption $K$ factors in the range of those predicted by previous theoretical studies on semi-inclusive processes.