Vector Meson Production at a Polarized HERA Collider

Abstract

A successful interpretation of the cross sections for elastic and inelastic vector meson production can be made if one assumes the underlying dynamics to be governed by hard partonic subprocesses. Extending these partonic approaches to longitudinally polarized electron-proton collisions, we estimate the expected production asymmetries at the HERA collider. The anticipated statistical errors on these asymmetries mostly turn out to be larger than the asymmetries themselves, such that an experimental observation of these asymmetries at HERA looks not feasible.