Decisive test of color transparency in exclusive electroproduction of vector mesons

Abstract

The exclusive production of vector mesons in deep inelastic scattering is a hard scattering process with the well controlled size of quark configurations which dominate the production amplitude. This allows an unambiguous prediction of color transparency effects in the coherent and incoherent production of vector mesons on nuclei. We demonstrate how the very mechanism of color transparency leads to a belated onset of color transparency effects as a function of $Q^{2}$. We conclude that the $Q^{2}$ dependence of the exclusive $\rho^{0}$-meson production on nuclei and nucleons observed in the Fermilab E665 experiment gives a solid evidence for the onset of color transparency. We propose the scaling relation between the $\rho^{0}$ and the $J/\Psi$ production, which further tests the mechanism of color transparency in exclusive (virtual) photoproduction.