https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-022-00901-9
Review
Models of 
photo-production reactions on the nucleon
1
Physics Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 60439, Argonne, IL, USA
2
Department of Physics, Kyungpook National University, 41566, Daegu, South Korea
3
Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, 37673, Pohang, Gyeongbuk, South Korea
Received:
8
October
2022
Accepted:
1
December
2022
Published online:
20
December
2022
The photo-production reactions on the nucleon can provide information on the roles of gluons in determining the -nucleon (-N) interactions and the structure of the nucleon. The information on the -N interactions is needed to test lattice QCD (LQCD) calculations and to understand the nucleon resonances such as 
recently reported by the LHCb Collaboration. In addition, it is also needed to investigate the production of nuclei with hidden charms and to extract the gluon distributions in nuclei. The main purpose of this article is to review six models of the 
reaction which have been and can be applied to analyze the data from Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab). The formulae for each model are given and used to obtain the results to show the extent to which the available data can be described. The models presented include the Pomeron-exchange model of Donnachie and Landshoff (Pom-DL) and its extensions to include -N potentials extracted from LQCD (Pom-pot) and to also use the constituent quark model (CQM) to account for the quark substructure of (Pom-CQM). The other three models are developed from applying the perturbative QCD approach to calculate the two-gluon exchange using the generalized parton distribution (GPD) of the nucleon (GPD-based), two- and three-gluon exchanges using the parton distribution of the nucleon (
), and the exchanges of scalar (
) and tensor (
) glueballs within the holographic formulation (holog). The results of investigating the excitation of the nucleon resonances in the reactions are also given. We demonstrate that the differences between these six models can be unambiguously distinguished and the 
can be better studied by using the forthcoming JLab data at large |t| and at energies very near the production threshold. Possible improvements of the considered models are discussed.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
