Skip to content

Exclusive Leptoproduction of rho0 Mesons from Hydrogen at Intermediate Virtual Photon Energies

HERMES Collaboration, A. Airapetian

hep-exarXiv:hep-ex/0004023

Abstract

Measurements of the cross section for exclusive virtual-photoproduction of rho0 mesons from hydrogen are reported. The data were collected by the HERMES experiment using 27.5 GeV positrons incident on a hydrogen gas target in the HERA storage ring. The invariant mass W of the photon-nucleon system ranges from 4.0 to 6.0 GeV, while the negative squared four-momentum Q2 of the virtual photon varies from 0.7 to 5.0 GeV2. The present data together with most of the previous data at W > 4 GeV are well described by a model that infers the W-dependence of the cross section from the dependence on the Bjorken scaling variable x of the unpolarized structure function for deep-inelastic scattering. In addition, a model calculation based on Off-Forward Parton Distributions gives a fairly good account of the longitudinal component of the rho0 production cross section for Q2 > 2 GeV2.

Create a lesson