Diffractive electroproduction of rho meson excitations

Abstract

We use perturbative QCD and parton-hadron duality to estimate the cross sections for the diffractive electroproduction of rhoprime(1-) and rho(3-) resonances which occur in the 1.3-1.8 GeV mass interval. We present the cross sections and the ratios sigma_L/sigma_T as a function of Q^2. We compare the predictions with those for the diffractive electroproduction of rho mesons. We show how such diffractive electroproduction measurements at HERA can probe features of the perturbative QCD 'Pomeron'.

Comments: LaTeX, 8 pages, 3 PostScript figures (uses epsf). The complete paper, including figures, is also available via anonymous ftp at ftp://cpt1.dur.ac.uk/pub/preprints/dtp97/dtp9706/