Next-to-leading order corrections in exclusive meson production

Abstract

We analyze in detail the size of next-to-leading order corrections to hard exclusive meson production within the collinear factorization approach. Corrections to the cross section are found to be huge at small xB and substantial in typical fixed-target kinematics. With the models we take for nucleon helicity-flip distributions, the transverse target polarization asymmetry in vector meson production is strongly affected by radiative corrections, except at large xB. Its overall size is very small for rho production but can be large in the omega channel.