A fresh look at exclusive electroproduction of light vector mesons

Relying on the collinear factorization approach, we demonstrate that H1 and ZEUS measurements of exclusive light vector meson and photon electroproduction cross sections can be simultaneously described for photon virtualities of <math><mrow><mi mathvariant="script">Q</mi><mo>≳</mo><mn>2</mn><mspace width="0.166667em"/><mi mathvariant="normal">GeV</mi></mrow></math> . Our findings reveal that quark exchanges are important in this small <math><msub><mi>x</mi><mi mathvariant="normal">Bj</mi></msub></math> region and that in leading order approximation the gluonic component is suppressed, e.g., the skewness ratio can be much smaller than one