On timelike and spacelike hard exclusive reactions

Understand

We show to next-to-leading order accuracy in the strong coupling alpha_s how the collinear factorization properties of QCD in the generalized Bjorken regime relate exclusive amplitudes for spacelike and timelike hadronic processes.

• This yields simple space--to--timelike relations linking the amplitudes for electroproduction of a photon or meson to those for photo- or meso-production of a lepton pair.
• These relations constitute a new test of the relevance of leading twist analyzes of experimental data.