Probing gluonic saturation in deeply virtual meson production beyond leading power

Abstract

Exclusive diffractive meson production represents a golden channel for investigating gluonic saturation inside nucleons and nuclei. In this letter, we settle a systematic framework to deal with beyond leading power corrections at small-$x$, including the saturation regime, and obtain the ${\gamma }^{\ast }\to M(\rho ,\varphi ,\omega )$ impact factor with both incoming photon and outgoing meson carrying arbitrary polarizations. This is of particular interest since the saturation scale at modern colliders, although entering a perturbative regime, is not large enough to prevents higher-twist effects to be sizable.

8 pages, 2 figures. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter