Probing nucleon strangeness structure with phi electroproduction

Abstract

We study the possibility to constrain the hidden strangeness content of the nucleon by means of the polarization observables in phi meson electroproduction. We consider the OZI evading direct knockout mechanism that arises from the non-vanishing s\bar{s} sea quark admixture of the nucleon as well as the background of the dominant diffractive and the one-boson-exchange processes. Large sensitivity on the nucleon strangeness are found in several beam-target and beam-recoil double polarization observables. The small \sqrt{s} and W region, which is accesible at some of the current high-energy electron facilities, is found to be the optimal energy region for extracting out the OZI evasion process.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX2e, elsart.cls, 3 figures (4 eps files