Nonperturbative and perturbative aspects of photo- and electroproduction of vector mesons

We discuss various aspects of vector meson production, first analysing the interplay between perturbative and nonperturbative aspects of the QCD calculation. Using a general method adapted to incorporate both perturbative and nonpertubative aspects, we show that nonperturbative effects are important for all experimentally available values of the photon virtuality Q2. We compare the huge amount of experimental information now available with our theoretical results obtained using a specific nonperturbative model without free parameters, showing that quite simple features are able to explain the data.