Exclusive vector meson production at HERMES

Abstract

Exclusive electroproduction of vector mesons has been measured on hydrogen and deuterium targets at HERMES using the 27.6 GeV electron/positron beam of HERA. From this process, more information can be obtained about generalized parton distributions (GPDs), which provide a unified description of the structure of hadrons embedding longitudinal-momentum distributions (ordinary PDFs) and transverse-position information (form factors). The study of the azimuthal distribution of the decay products via spin-density matrix elements provide constraints on helicity-amplitudes used to describe exclusive vector-meson production. Recent results from the HERMES experiment on the production of rho, omega and phi mesons will be presented.