Exclusive emissions of polarized $\rho$ mesons at the EIC and the proton content at low $x$

Abstract

We present a new study on helicity amplitudes and cross sections for the exclusive production of $\rho$ mesons at the EIC in high-energy factorization. In this framework the analytic expression of amplitudes takes the form of a convolution between an off-shell impact factor, depicting the ($\gamma^* \to \rho$) transition, and a nonperturbative density, known as Unintegrated Gluon Distribution (UGD) that encodes information about the proton structure at low $x$ and evolves according to the BFKL equation. We come out with an evidence that observables sensitive to the polarizations of the incoming virtual photon and of the emitted meson allow us to discriminate among different UGD models and to gather quantitative information on the proton content at high energies.