Central production of mesons: Exotic states versus Pomeron structure

Abstract

We demonstrate that the azimuthal dependence of central meson production in hadronic collisions, when suitably binned, provides unambiguous tests of whether the Pomeron couples like a conserved vector-current to protons. We discuss the possibility of discriminating between q-qbar and glueball production in such processes. Our predictions apply also to meson production in tagged two-photon events at electron--positron colliders and to vector-meson production in ep collisions at HERA.