$\phi$ photoprodution with coupled-channel effects

Abstract

We study phi photoproduction with various hadronic rescattering contributions included, in addition to the Pomeron and pseudoscalar meson-exchange diagrams. We find that the hadronic box diagrams can explain the recent experimental data in the vicinity of the threshold. In particular, the bump-like structure at the photon energy E_gamma \approx 2.3$ GeV is well explained by the K Lambda(1520) rescattering amplitude in the intermediate state, which is the dominant contribution among other hadronic contributions. We also find that the hadronic box diagrams are consistent with the observed spin-density matrix elements near the threshold region.