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Testing the dynamics of high energy scattering using vector meson production

I review work on diffractive vector meson production in photon-proton collisions at high energy and large momentum transfer, accompanied by proton dissociation and a large rapidity gap. This process provides a test of the high energy scattering dynamics, but is also sensitive to the details of the treatment of the vector meson vertex. The emphasis is on the description of the process by a solution of the non-forward BFKL equation, i.e. the equation describing the evolution of scattering amplitudes in the high-energy limit of QCD. The formation of the vector meson and the non-perturbative modeling needed is also briefly discussed.