Scale Issues in High-Energy Diffractive Vector-Meson Production

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent experimental results from HERA on diffractive vector-meson production, examining the transition from non-perturbative to perturbative QCD regimes and testing theoretical models with high-energy data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of high-|t| vector-meson production data, supporting the applicability of pQCD in certain kinematic regions and comparing results across different experiments and models.

Findings

pQCD accurately describes high-|t| inelastic vector-meson production

Transition region identified at 0.2 < Q^2 < 2 GeV^2

Mass of the vector meson acts as a scaling variable

Abstract

Recent measurements of diffractive vector-meson production with the general-purpose detectors H1 and ZEUS in electron-proton interactions with 300 GeV center-of-mass energy at the HERA accelerator complex have stimulated great interest in the question of whether perturbative QCD (pQCD) can provide an accurate description of such diffractive processes. The high flux of quasi-real photons from the 27.5 GeV electron beam has allowed high-statistics studies of vector-meson photoproduction to be compared to the deeply inelastic processes at high photon virtuality Q^2 >> \Lambda^2_QCD. Special-purpose electron detectors at small scattering angle have been used to identify a transition region, 0.2 < Q^2 < 2 GeV^2, where the pQCD prediction for the dominance of point-like configurations of qqbar-pairs is verified. Data samples characterized by high momentum transfer to the 820 GeV initial-state proton, 1 < |t| < 13 GeV^2, have now become available, and the results lend support to the proposition that pQCD calculations should accurately describe the inelastic vector-meson production processes in high-|t| photoproduction. Measurements of the energy dependence and the t-dependence of the elastic cross sections for rho, omega, phi, and J/psi production have provided tests of the proposal that the mass (or size) of the vector meson provides a third scaling variable for studying the transition to the domain of pQCD applicability. A preliminary result on elastic upsilon production has also been announced by the ZEUS collaboration. These issues of scale will be discussed in the context of topical phenomenological models, comparing the HERA results and those from fixed-target experiments at lower energy to the wealth of calculations available in the contemporary literature.