“…Elastic photoproduction of φ mesons, γp → φp, has previously been studied at photon-proton centre-of-mass energies up to W ≈ 17 GeV in fixed target experiments [1,2,3]. At these energies the reaction γp → φp has the characteristics of a soft diffractive process: a cross section rising weakly with the centre-of-mass energy, a steep forward diffractive peak in the t distribution, where t is the four-momentum transfer squared at the proton vertex, and s-channel helicity conservation.…”