Measurement of diffractive photoproduction of vector mesons at large momentum transfer at HERA

Elastic and proton–dissociative photoproduction of , and vector mesons (, , respectively) have been measured in interactions at HERA up to GeV, where t is the four-momentum transfer squared at the photon–vector–meson vertex. The analysis is based on a data sample in which photoproduction reactions were tagged by detection of the scattered positron in a special-purpose calorimeter. This limits the photon virtuality, , to values less than 0.01 GeV, and selects a average center-of-mass energy of = 94 GeV. Results for the differential cross sections, , for , and mesons are presented and compared to the results of recent QCD calculations. Results are also presented for the t-dependence of the pion-pair invariant-mass distribution in the mass region and of the spin-density matrix elements determined from the decay-angle distributions. The Pomeron trajectory has been derived from measurements of the W dependence of the elastic differential cross sections for both and mesons.