Exclusive emissions of vector mesons in forward directions of rapidity offer us a faultless chance to probe the proton structure at small-x. A high-energy factorization formula is established within BFKL, given as the convolution of an impact factor depicting the forward-meson emission and of an unintegrated gluon distribution (UGD) driving the gluon evolution at small-x. As a nonperturbative quantity, the UGD is not well known and several models for it exist. We present recent progresses on the study of the exclusive forward ρ-meson leptoproduction at HERA and EIC energies, showing how osbervables sensitive to different polarization states of the ρ-particle act as discriminators for the existing UGD models.
@article{arxiv.2107.12725,
title = {Exclusive emissions of rho-mesons and the unintegrated gluon distribution},
author = {Andrèe Dafne Bolognino and Francesco Giovanni Celiberto and Dmitry Yu. Ivanov and Alessandro Papa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.12725},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
8 pages, 1 figure, contribution to the proceedings of the XXVIII International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects (DIS2021), Stony Brook, New York, USA, 12-16 April, 2021, version accepted for publication on SciPost Physics Proceedings