Evidence of collinear factorization breaking due to collinear-to-soft Glauber exchanges for a $2 \to 3$ exclusive process at leading twist

Abstract: We exhibit an exclusive process, namely the photoproduction of a $\pi^{0}\gamma$ pair with large invariant mass, which violates collinear factorization. We explicitly demonstrate that this is due to the fact that there exists diagrams with gluon exchange in $t$ channel, contributing at the leading power, for which Glauber gluons are trapped. This is caused by the pinching of the contour integration of both the plus and minus light-cone components of the Glauber gluon momentum. We argue that this leads to the observed ``endpoint-like'' divergence of the convolution integral at leading order and leading power when collinear factorization is na\"ively assumed.