Exclusive photoproduction of a heavy vector meson in QCD

The process of exclusive heavy vector meson photoproduction, gamma(p) --> V-p, is studied in the framework of QCD factorization. The mass of the produced meson, V = Y or J/Psi, provides a hard scale for the process. We demonstrate that, in the heavy quark limit and at the one-loop order in perturbation theory, the amplitude factorizes in a convolution of a perturbatively calculable hard-scattering amplitude with the generalized parton densities and the non-relativistic QCD matrix element [O-1](V). We evaluate the hard-scattering amplitude at one-loop order and compare the data with theoretical predictions using an available model for generalized parton distributions.