Color transparency in electroproduction of the ρ meson at low energies

Abstract

The study of color transparency (CT) in elastic electroproduction of vector mesons off nuclei encounters the problem of the onset of coherence length (CL) effects. The problem of CT-CL separation arises especially at medium energies, corresponding to the HERMES experiment, when the coherence length is of the order of the nuclear radius RA . Only at asymptotic high energies, corresponding to large CL, l c >> R A , can the CT-CL mixing be eliminated. On the other hand, the net CT effects can be studied in the kinematic range accessible by the experiment at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility's large acceptance spectrometer (CLAS) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, since in that case the CL is much smaller than the nuclear radius. Using light-cone QCD dipole formalism, we investigate manifestations of CT effects in the electroproduction of vector mesons. Motivated by expected data from the CLAS experiment, we predict the A and Q 2 dependence of nuclear transparency for p° mesons produced incoherently off nuclei. We demonstrate that in the CLAS kinematic region, the CL effects are weak enough to keep the photon energy at such values as to obtain maximal photon virtualities keeping optimal statistics of the data. This has a clear advantage over a standard investigation of net CT effects fixing CL.