Vector Meson Production at Hermes

Diiractive production of , , ! and J== mesons is observed at the Hermes experiment at DESY. Hermes scatters the 27.5 GeV longitudinally polarised positrons of the HERA storage ring oo an internal gas storage cell target. Polarised and unpolarised gas targets of diierent types are used. The exclusive production from diierent nuclear targets (H, D, 3 He and 14 N) shows coherent and incoherent contributions that depend on the atomic mass A and Q 2. For 3 He the incoherent contribution is smaller than for H and D. The nuclear transparency T has been extracted as a function of Q 2 and and shows no signiicant signal of color transparency eeects. The polari-sation of beam and target at Hermes will allow for the world's rst measurement of double-spin asymmetries in combination with decay angle information. This will allow a nearly complete characterization of the angular momentum structure of the reaction. First results for the longitudinal and linear polarisation of-mesons and for the ratio of the longitudinal versus transverse cross section of-mesons as a function of Q 2 are presented. J== mesons are observed at Hermes in the muonic and the electronic decay channel. As they are produced by photon-gluon fusion processes, the observed spin asymmetry from polarised target data contains information about the gluon spin distribution in the nucleon. As the available statistics is marginal for a determination of G, Hermes currently performs an upgrade of the spectrometer. A ring image Cerenkov detector, a muon detector and a small angle spectrometer will be installed in 1998 and an additional vertex detector in 1999. The upgrade will improve the identiication of charmed and strange mesons, the detection of heavy decaying and slow recoil particles and the detection of the scattered positron in low-Q 2 (photoproduction) events.