Exclusive production of $ρ$-mesons in high-energy factorization at HERA and EIC

Andrèe Dafne Bolognino; Francesco Giovanni Celiberto; Dmitry Yu. Ivanov; Alessandro Papa; Wolfgang Schäfer; Antoni Szczurek

Paper

Exclusive production of $ρ$-mesons in high-energy factorization at HERA and EIC

Abstract

We calculate cross sections for the exclusive diffractive leptoproduction of

-mesons,

, within the framework of high-energy factorization. Cross sections for longitudinally and transversally polarized mesons are shown. We employ a wide variety of unintegrated gluon distributions available in the literature and compare to HERA data. The resulting cross sections strongly depend on the choice of unintegrated gluon distribution. We also present predictions for the proton target in the kinematics of the Brookhaven EIC.