Spin rotation effects in diffractive electroproduction of heavy quarkonia

In this work we present for the first time the comprehensive study of the Melosh spin rotation effects in diffractive electroproduction of S-wave heavy quarkonia off a nucleon target. Such a study has been performed within the color dipole approach using, as an example and a reference point, two popular parametrizations of the dipole cross section and two potentials describing the interaction between Q and $${\bar{Q}}$$ and entering in the Schrödinger equation based formalism for determination of the quarkonia wave functions. We find a strong onset of spin rotation effects in 1S charmonium photoproduction which is obviously neglected in present calculations of corresponding cross sections. For photoproduction of radially excited $$\psi '(2S)$$ these effects are even stronger leading to an increase of the photoproduction cross section by a factor of $$2\div 3$$ depending on the photon energy. Even in production of radially excited $$\Upsilon '(2S)$$ and $$\Upsilon ''(3S)$$ they can not be neglected and cause the 20–30$$\%$$ enhancement of the photoproduction cross section. Finally, we predict that the spin effects vanish gradually with photon virtuality $$Q^2$$ following universality properties in production of different heavy quarkonia as a function of $$Q^2 + M_V^2$$