Diffractive rho + lepton pair production at an electron-ion collider

Abstract

In high energy electron-ion colliders, a new way to probe nucleon structure becomes available through diffractive reactions, where the incident particle produces a very energetic almost forward particle. QCD describes these reactions as due to the exchange of a Pomeron which may be perturbatively described as a dressed two-gluon state, provided a hard scale allows the factorization of the amplitude in terms of two impact factors convoluted with a Pomeron propagator. We consider here a process where such a description allows to access hadronic structure in terms of the generalized parton distributions, namely the electroproduction of a forward $\rho$ meson and a timelike deeply virtual photon, separated by a large rapidity gap. We explore the dependence of the cross section on the kinematic variables and study the dependence on the non-perturbative inputs (generalized parton distributions, distribution amplitude). Our leading order studies show the cross section is mainly sensitive to the GPD model input, but the small size of the cross sections could prohibit straightforward analysis of this process at planned facilities.

published version; corrected typos, conclusion discussion expanded

References in corpus (2)

• NLO corrections to timelike, spacelike and double deeply virtual Compton scattering
• Diffractive two-meson electroproduction with a nucleon and deuteron target

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Accessing chiral-even quark generalised parton distributions in the exclusive photoproduction of a $\gamma {\pi }^{\pm }$ pair with large invariant mass in both fixed-target and collider experiments
• Exclusive production of quarkonia pairs in collinear factorization framework
• Exclusive photoproduction of ${\eta }_c\gamma$ pairs with large invariant mass
• Photoproduction of ${\eta }_c\gamma$ pairs in CGC framework
• Accessing quark GPDs in diffractive events at an electron-ion collider