Probing Orbital Angular Momentum Distributions in Elastic Vector Meson Production in Longitudinally Polarized Electron--Proton Scattering
Abstract
We consider elastic vector meson production in longitudinally polarized electron-proton collisions at small x. Inspired by previous pioneering proposals in the literature, we calculate the numerator of the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry (DSA) within the polarized small-x formalism for both the transversely and longitudinally polarized vector mesons. Our calculation demonstrates that the cosϕkΔ azimuthal harmonic of the DSA for the elastic vector meson production at small transverse momentum transfer (with ϕkΔ the azimuthal angle between the transverse momenta of the outgoing electron and meson in the dipole/Trento frame) provides a promising probe of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) distributions at small x. Our results can be applied to several different vector meson species, thus opening up a new class of observables that can be used to extract OAM distributions from experimental data.
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BibTeX
@misc{kovchegov2026probing,
title = {{Probing Orbital Angular Momentum Distributions in Elastic Vector Meson Production in Longitudinally Polarized Electron--Proton Scattering}},
author = {Yuri V. Kovchegov and Brandon Manley},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.33255},
eprint = {2610.33255},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33255},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Probing Orbital Angular Momentum Distributions in Elastic Vector Meson Production in Longitudinally Polarized Electron--Proton Scattering
AU - Yuri V. Kovchegov
AU - Brandon Manley
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/23
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.33255
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33255
AB - We consider elastic vector meson production in longitudinally polarized electron-proton collisions at small x. Inspired by previous pioneering proposals in the literature, we calculate the numerator of the longitudinal double-spin asymmetry (DSA) within the polarized small-x formalism for both the transversely and longitudinally polarized vector mesons. Our calculation demonstrates that the cosϕ_kΔ azimuthal harmonic of the DSA for the elastic vector meson production at small transverse momentum transfer (with ϕ_kΔ the azimuthal angle between the transverse momenta of the outgoing electron and meson in the dipole/Trento frame) provides a promising probe of the orbital angular momentum (OAM) distributions at small x. Our results can be applied to several different vector meson species, thus opening up a new class of observables that can be used to extract OAM distributions from experimental data.
ER -