Deep electroproduction of exotic hybrid mesons

Abstract

We evaluate the leading order amplitude for the deep exclusive electroproduction of an exotic hybrid meson in the Bjorken regime. We show that, contrary to naive expectation, this amplitude factorizes at the twist 2 level and thus scales like usual meson electroproduction when the virtual photon and the hybrid meson are longitidinally polarized. Exotic hybrid mesons may thus be studied in electroproduction experiments at JLAB, HERA (HERMES) or CERN (COMPASS).