The extraction of ϕ–N total cross section from d (γ, pK+ K−) n

We report on the first measurement of the differential cross section of ϕ-meson photoproduction for the d(γ,pK+K−)n exclusive reaction channel. The experiment was performed using a tagged-photon beam and the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at Jefferson Lab. A combined analysis using data from the d(γ,pK+K−)n channel and those from a previous publication on coherent ϕ production on the deuteron has been carried out to extract the ϕ−N total cross section, σϕN. The extracted ϕ−N total cross section favors a value above 20 mb. This value is larger than the value extracted using vector-meson dominance models for ϕ photoproduction on the proton