The photoproduction of vector mesons

At high energy, the photoproduction or electroproduction of Vector Mesons allow to prepare a beam of quark-antiquark pairs of a given flavor. At high momentum transfer, the study of the scattering of these pairs on a nucleon opens up an original window on the quark-gluon structure of hadronic matter, which may eventually shed light on its gluonic content, on correlations between quarks and on the van der Walls part of the interaction between hadrons.