Behaviour of the forward peak in hard diffractive leptoproduction of vector mesons

Abstract

The measured forward slope in elastic and inelastic leptoproduction of vector mesons differ by a substantial amount. In an attempt to describe this phenomenon we construct a two radii model for the target proton, and estimate the effective parameters of the hard Pomeron obtained from a pQCD dipole model with eikonal shadowing corrections (SC). We show that the SC reduce the intercept of the hard Pomeron and generate an effective shrinkage of the forward peak and a diffractive dip at $|t| \approx 1 GeV^2$, which appears to affect the value of the experimentally measured slope.