Exotic hybrid mesons in hard electroproduction

Abstract

We estimate the sizeable cross section for deep exclusive electroproduction of an exotic $J^{PC}=1^{-+}$ hybrid meson in the Bjorken regime. The production amplitude scales like the one for usual meson electroproduction, i.e. as $1/Q^2$. This is due to the non-vanishing leading twist distribution amplitude for the hybrid meson, which may be normalized thanks to its relation to the energy momentum tensor and to the QCD sum rules technique. The hard amplitude is considered up to next-to-leading order in $α_{S}$ and we explore the consequences of fixing the renormalization scale ambiguity through the BLM procedure. We study the particular case where the hybrid meson decays through a $πη$ meson pair. We discuss the $πη$ generalized distribution amplitude and then calculate the production amplitude for this process. We propose a forward-backward asymmetry in the production of $π$ and $η$ mesons as a signal for the hybrid meson production. We briefly comment on hybrid electroproduction at very high energy, in the diffractive limit where a QCD Odderon exchange mechanism should dominate. The conclusion of our study is that hard electroproduction is a promissing way to study exotic hybrid mesons, in particular at JLAB, HERA (HERMES) or CERN (Compass).