Helicity in diffractive vector-meson production

Abstract

We study the helicity amplitudes describing the quasielastic production of vector mesons in deep inelastic scattering within the context of the model which we previously introduced to describe the ratio of longitudinal to transverse cross sections. We calculate here a full set of spin flip (and non-flip) amplitudes and naturally find a significant violation of s-channel helicity conservation. We present predictions for the 15 spin-density matrix elements which completely define the angular distributions and the helicity properties of the produced meson.