Next-to-leading order corrections in exclusive meson production

Understand

We analyze in detail the size of next-to-leading order corrections to hard exclusive meson production within the collinear factorization approach.

• Corrections to the cross section are found to be huge at small xB and substantial in typical fixed-target kinematics.
• With the models we take for nucleon helicity-flip distributions, the transverse target polarization asymmetry in vector meson production is strongly affected by radiative corrections, except at large xB.
• Its overall size is very small for rho production but can be large in the omega channel.