The photoproduction of vector mesons

Abstract

At high energy, the photoproduction or electroproduction of Vector Mesons allow to prepare a beam of quark-antiquark pairs of a given flavor. At high momentum transfer, the study of the scattering of these pairs on a nucleon opens up an original window on the quark-gluon structure of hadronic matter, which may eventually shed light on its gluonic content, on correlations between quarks and on the van der Walls part of the interaction between hadrons.

Comments: 10 pages; 9 figures; Invited talk at the "Third International Conference on Perspectives in Hadronic Physics", Trieste (Italy), 7--11 May 2001; Nucl. Phys. A, in press