Exclusive electroproduction of vector mesons and transversity distributions

Abstract

We show that the leading twist contribution to exclusive electroproduction of transversely polarized vector mesons vanishes at all orders in perturbation theory. Therefore one cannot extract information on the quark transversity distribution of the nucleon from this reaction. In turn one has that the produced vector meson is purely longitudinal in the large-${Q}^{2}$ limit, which provides a new test of the dominance of leading twist at finite ${Q}^{2}.$