Leptoproduction of rho mesons as discriminator for the unintegrated gluon distribution in the proton

The gluon content of the proton, in the high-energy regime, is embodied by the unintegrated gluon distribution (UGD), which describes the gluon emission probability, with a given longitudinal momentum fraction and transverse momentum. The UGD, formulated within the -factorization approach, has universal validity, and several models for it have been proposed so far. We will show that the polarized rho-meson leptoproduction at HERA is a non-trivial testfield for discriminating among existing models of UGD.