NLO corrections to the deeply virtual meson production revisited: impact on the extraction of generalized parton distributions

TL;DR

This paper revisits NLO QCD corrections to deeply virtual meson production, demonstrating their importance for accurately extracting generalized parton distributions and achieving a unified description of related processes.

Contribution

It introduces a conformal partial wave formalism to include higher-order effects, enabling a consistent NLO analysis of multiple exclusive processes.

Findings

NLO corrections are essential for describing high-energy vector meson production.

A unified NLO framework describes DIS, DVCS, and DVMP with universal GPDs.

The approach improves the understanding of proton structure at NLO.

Abstract

We revisit the next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD corrections for the deeply virtual meson production (DVMP) process, exploring its phenomenology both in isolation and in a multichannel fit combined with deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS). Our approach involves the conformal partial wave (CPaW) formalism, which allows for the straightforward inclusion of higher-order contributions and evolutionary effects. Our findings indicate that a description of the longitudinal component of the vector meson DVMP cross-section at high energies is achievable only at NLO within the standard collinear approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate a simultaneous description of DIS, DVCS, and DVMP processes, providing insights into the proton structure described at NLO by unique universal generalized parton distribution (GPD) functions.