Hard Exclusive Production of Tensor Mesons

Abstract

We point out that hard exclusive production of tensor mesons $f_2(1270)$ with helicity $\lambda =\pm 2$ is dominated by the gluon component in the meson wave function and can be used to determine gluon admixture in tensor mesons in a theoretically clean manner. We present a detailed analysis of the tensor meson distribution amplitudes and calculate the transition form factor $\gamma +{\gamma }^{\ast }\to f_2(1270)$ for one real and one virtual photon.

Comments: 7 pages, 3 figures