Light vector meson photoproduction at large t

Abstract

We have studied in perturbative QCD all independent helicity amplitudes describing the photoproduction of light vector mesons at large $t$. We found a new hard production mechanism which is related to the possibility for a real photon to fluctuate into a massless $q\bar q$ pair in a chiral-odd spin configuration. Each helicity amplitude is given as a sum of a usual chiral-even contribution (when the helicities of quark and antiquark are antiparallel) and this additional chiral-odd part (where the helicities of quark and antiquark are parallel). The chiral-odd contribution is large, it leads to a dominance of the non spin-flip amplitude in a very broad region of intermediately high $|t|$. All amplitudes are expressed in terms of short distance asymptotics of the light-cone wave functions of vector meson (photon). We demonstrate that for each helicity amplitude there exists a soft non-factorizable contribution. We give arguments that for dominant non spin-flip helicity amplitude the relative contribution of the soft nonfactorizable interactions is numerically not large.