Hard Electroproduction of Vector Mesons

In this talk I am going to report on an ongoing analysis [1, 2, 3] of hard electroproduction of light vector mesons within the handbag approach which is based on QCD factorization into hard subprocesses and generalized parton distributions (GPDs) encoding the soft, nonperturbative physics. As is well-known the leading-twist contribution (i.e. employing the collinear approximation) evaluated to leading-order of perturbative QCD, overestimates the cross section for the processes of interest drastically at photon virtualities, Q, of about 10GeV. This effect diminishes with increasing Q but the predictions to leading-twist accuracy are still larger than experiment [4] at, say, 100GeV, see dashed line in Fig. 1.