Hard Exclusive Production of Tensor Mesons

Abstract

We point out that hard exclusive production of tensor mesons $f_2(1270)$ with helicity $λ=\pm 2$ is dominated by the gluon component in the meson wave function and can be used to determine gluon admixture in tensor mesons in a theoretically clean manner. We present a detailed analysis of the tensor meson distribution amplitudes and calculate the transition form factor $γ+γ^*\to f_2(1270)$ for one real and one virtual photon.