Central production of mesons: Exotic states versus Pomeron structure

We demonstrate that the azimuthal dependence of central meson production in hadronic collisions, when suitably binned, provides unambiguous tests of whether the Pomeron couples like a conserved vector-current to protons. We discuss the possibility of discriminating between qq̄ and glueball production in such processes. Our predictions apply also to meson production in tagged two-photon events at electron–positron colliders and to vector-meson production in ep collisions at HERA.